Creating Powerful Black and White Portraits with PETER COULSON EP154

[00:00:23] Speaker A: Well, well, well. [00:00:24] Speaker B: Good morning everybody and welcome back to the Camera Life podcast. It is Thursday 5th February 2026 and we are here to bring you yet another amazing photography interview, or photography interview I should say. We are joined today by beauty, fashion, portrait, fine art photographer Peter Colson. Peter, welcome to the show. It's great to have you on board. [00:00:47] Speaker A: Yeah, it's good to be here. Looking forward to it. [00:00:50] Speaker B: Yeah. So we've been talking about getting you on for quite some time and here you are. It's almost like Christmas for some of us. Now today we're going to obviously we're gonna, we're gonna unpack your as much of your story as we can fit into this time slot. But just before we get on to that, just a quick good morning to Justin and Jim is back everybody. [00:01:10] Speaker C: Jim's back. [00:01:11] Speaker B: Yeah. Everybody clap for Jim. Well done, Jim. Yeah, great to have you back, mate. [00:01:15] Speaker C: I should, I guess Peter, we should introduce ourselves officially. I'm Justin, I'm a ex wedding photographer. That's probably the best way to describe me and amongst other things, sports and bits and pieces. And Jim, Jim, what are you? You're a current wedding photographer? Wedding photographer, budding boudoir photographer and also a bit of a, bit of everything kind of thing. And Greg's a, Greg's the podmaster and well, street photographer. I do a film shooter. [00:01:48] Speaker B: Don't hold that again. We all make mistakes, Peter. We all make mistakes. But look, great to have you on board. We will get to saying good morning to the chat in just a moment. But let's just dive straight into a question, Peter, for the folks that. For the handful of people who may not know who you are, who are you? What do you shoot? What are you known for? [00:02:13] Speaker A: I'm self taught. I failed at school so bad they kicked me out after a month and gave me parents their money back. [00:02:23] Speaker B: Wow. If they kept the money you would understand. But just giving the money back is just a statement on its own. [00:02:28] Speaker C: Yeah, next level. [00:02:29] Speaker A: It's pretty good. Completely just. It was a hobby I did alongside my passion which was music and it was something I enjoyed alongside of that. And as I traveled through life it was something I used a lot with my businesses. So I ended up taking photos of stuff for my businesses which became ads for my businesses. And then some stupid magazine thought I was good enough to employ or book me. And that is my style. I just self, completely self taught look at something I like and want to know how to do it or try and teach myself how to do it. And anything I don't like, I just flick the page. Don't care. And I predominantly black and white photographer. I love black and white because it's timeless and I love fashion and I love fashion beauty portraits. And I've also got a very messed up sense of humor and mind. So I'll do some crazy art stuff, which is. Sometimes people say it's inappropriate, but it's my way of getting people to discuss subjects without writing something on there and sort of opens people's eyes up a little bit. That's pretty much me in a nutshell. [00:03:50] Speaker B: Yep. Okay, I want to follow on from that. Before you joined us earlier this morning, Justin and I were talking about how we noticed on your, on your website and on your workshop website and on your socials, some of which we can't show today because it's the nature of the sort of work you do. But we will bring up your Instagram a little bit later on. But we saw no mention of the word boudoir. Now we talked about, you know, Jim's a budding, excellent boudoir photographer. How do you define the difference between boudoir and beauty and fashion? You know, people like to pigeonhole genres. Where do you see that in. In relation to your work? [00:04:30] Speaker A: Lots of people won't like my answer, but it's. I don't know how my eyes were trained to fashion and it. I was trying to. Well, I think I've worked out how it happened and boudoir is so far left to what fashion is. So fashion is about. It's more about shape, it's more about soul feel. We don't necessarily need clothes. In fact, quite often having less clothes means the story can be told better. Because, you know, that tartan jacket's not saying something, that cowboy hat's not. You follow me? There's. I studied a lot of this stuff. Like when I started, I was doing a lot of stuff for pinup magazines and those 1950s, 1960s and that boudoiri look and the old flapper girls look. A lot of that is really soft porn. It's really designed more for males to look at, whereas I much prefer take photos for females to look at. And there's just a difference about the whole feel of the picture. A girl laying on the side with a pillow looking at you, oh, hello. Most females don't like that picture. That's what a male likes to look at. They'd rather someone like an Angelina Jolie sitting there butt naked on a chair, just staring them back down, going f you and that's where that's the difference. My eyes are trains and my grandmother's most likely the reason for this. But most of the people in my life are females. I have very few male like friends I see every day. Like I've got to put up with Beck every day of my. But most of most of my good friends before Beck, there was Natasha, who's still a very good friend. She was my muse for like 10 years and she's very pregnant at the moment. I shot her pregnancy shots on the weekend. We go for walks now and you know, two hour walk and just have a chat together. So that's just the people in my life and it's very annoying for me and upsetting for me. Amount of people that try and look at my work and try and sexualize it or try and make it. This is, you know, whereas lots of my pictures, women look like they're naked, but they're not naked. And that's the big difference with me. Nobody knows this. Beck and I did a series on the street. Naked on the street. Beck does not do nude. We've got pictures of her in Disneyland, in Times Square, on Sunset Boulevard, at the Coliseum, in all around the world. And she looks butt naked except she's got a pair of boots on. It's just the way we pose her. But because of that there's a whole feel to the picture. And that's how I work. It's more about. It's one of the reasons I like my black and white. You don't know what year it was taken. Yeah, you can never tell what year of black and white's been taken. Maybe if you put a sepia or something over it and things like that. And the same with clothing. As soon as you add clothing, you're adding a story. So I, it's not like I want their boobs out because that's distracting on their own. But I like to remove anything that's going to add to a story that I don't want. I just want them to see the person and more. A lot of people don't realize I am actually an eye photographer. And it really annoys me. Some of my most favorite photographers in the world are not high photographers. They're their story. Like Helmut Newton. Beautiful shapes, high end fashion. Very rarely does he put an expression in the eye or chase an expression, whereas that's who I am. And I don't like look away shots. Look away to me is a failure. Like if I'm going to model that, I can't get A shot. Look away. I'll get a shot straight away. But to me, I'm not seeing her soul come out her eyes. And if you go to my website or my Instagram and flick very quickly, you'll see very, very quickly. A lot of my pictures are about the eyes. [00:08:33] Speaker C: Yep. Yeah, I'm scrolling through right now. It's like. Yeah, you're just getting. You're getting eye contact immediately from every picture, basically. [00:08:44] Speaker A: And some. Some of these pictures, it took an hour, an hour and a half to get that frame. It's very hard to get someone to let go. So actually you're getting part of their soul come out. And you can try and, you know, try and tell the model a story. Good luck with that. Just because you think Justin Timberlake's hot, I guarantee you the model doesn't. So trying to find the story, you tell them to get that look, you can't, because you don't know what they like and what they don't like. They're not going to tell you because if they're into Justin Timberlake, they're never going to tell you that. So they're going to be living a lie. So already their eyes are in a lie. So I tend to work with when I'm talking to them. Go to your favorite place in the world. Don't tell me. I don't want to know. You just go there right now and be there with who you want to be there with. And that could be an animal. It could be whatever. I'm not putting anything. I'm letting them go to a place, allowing them to start to relax and then try. And I'm always watching so much on the eyes. And once I start to see something, then I'll build on that until I can get the eyes. I want one of the series that I haven't done it for a little while. It's so hard to do, is crying shot and getting the first tear and I'm not there sitting, oh, you're ugly. You shouldn't be a model. You shouldn't be. I don't do that, so I'm not. It has to come real. It has to be a real tear. So with a couple of models, sort of, it was pretty easy. Music could do it for them. There was a certain. It might have been soundtrack to a movie that got them to cry and things like that. I think I wasted two hours with Beck and the tear would just start. Just start to start, then disappear. Should suck it back in. It was so frustrating. And then one day we're walking through Barcelona and all of a sudden she's got tears pouring out of her eyes because there's a pug, a little dog walking up the footpath. And she used to have a pug herself, Doug the Pug. And she saw that and tears just poured out her eyes and said, you bitch. [00:10:55] Speaker C: Well, I mean, now, you know, you just need a pug in the studio. [00:10:58] Speaker A: Yeah, get some puppies. That sounds. Oh, yeah, no, yeah, no, it's pretty much. But yeah, things like that. That taught me a lot and some. I recently I did one for a singer of a metal band and we were having discussion and I sort of brought it up and she said she'd love to do it. And then next minute I'm doing commercial shoot for her for a single. It was something about the tears. So we shot everything she wanted. I said, all right, remember we were talking about this the other day. Tears. Now we're going for the crying shot. And literally it didn't take me that long. Took about 10 minutes. And we got the first tier and that was a single, you know, the COVID for a song. So those things it. You tend to learn a lot when you put yourself under pressure to get shots like that. I don't do a lot of it because you need the right person. And most of the models feel very flat for the next 10 minutes afterwards because they've had to go to a deep place to get that, so it can kill the rest of the shoot. So if you don't want to do it at the start of the shoot. [00:12:00] Speaker C: Don'T do it at the start. I'm interested about like going back to just working with like taking their happy place to get the eye contact or the. Or the. The soul in the eyes that you're looking for. At what point in the shoot does that normally happen? When do you. Is it like you've got everything working for the shot you want and then you're just looking for that. That thing in the eyes and that's when you start working on that. Like when. When in the process does that start to happen? [00:12:30] Speaker A: Right. If I'm working with someone I haven't worked for before, I normally. The first 15, 20 minutes I just let them go and I'll see that they're either a stop, a click move model. So it'll be. And I will not move till you click and then they'll move and then you'll click then. And I let them do some of that stuff. It's a lot of Ecom commercial crappers like that. So They've got into these habits after a while. I try and get that out of them. I've got a couple of videos. I show them how real models move. And I normally turn my camera off and get lift a video. So when you lift a video, they can't do stop and wait for the click. They have to move. So all of a sudden they start moving. They get this nice little drift. They'll have a little bit of a pattern. They always do. And then once they start doing that, I can put the cap and then start shooting them. A lot of models, when they click, they'll go from here to here to here. Every one of those shots is a pose. It's not that person. It's basically just something stuck on the front of them. But as soon as you get them to move from there to there, slowly, they feel something in that journey, their face changes and that click. So once I can get them to flow and just be them so it doesn't feel like they're trying to pose or actually moving, how they would really move. And once they're doing that fluidly, then I start working on the inside, trying to get the eyes. There's lots of tricks I use with models. And lighting is simple. Lighting is so easy. Capturing that moment with a model is so hard. It's nearly as hard as doing a wedding. I have done, have done weddings. I hate them. I'm so stressed at a wedding. Not you can't do it. You drive to the bride's place, you leave the bride's place and you go. If I crash now they don't have a photographer. I hope everything. Sorry, I'm like that the entire wedding. [00:14:33] Speaker C: Yeah, you can't think about that. When, when did you do one? When, when did. Was this like early in your career? How did it come about? [00:14:42] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. It's a point where I made a transition from being a fishing photographer, a lifestyle photographer, to trying to get into fashion. I know, it's a big difference. My wife said, whatever you want to do. When I did that, I basically was weddings, parties, anything. Any single thing I could do to earn a cent out of photography, I did. And I tried to work three to four days a week earning as much money as I can without ripping people off. Just been good, fair supply and good work. But one minute I'll be shooting real estate, next one would be corporate headshots and I'll be doing babies and I'm doing weddings. So anything. And in the three days I had free each week, that was just 100% on my folio and what I wanted to do. And that was the only stuff I showed the world. I didn't show anything. I never posted any of my. What I called money making work. And I still don't. 90% of my commercial work, most people never see because it's not my work as an art director. There's somebody else's idea. It's because if I would have done it, I would have done it different. So I was lucky enough to have a couple of clients that were really, really good. And it was here, Peter, off you go. And it was you. You pick the models, you do the hair, makeup. You do the same. You do the whole story. It's your shoot. Yep. [00:16:09] Speaker C: That's amazing. [00:16:09] Speaker B: I want to dive into a bit of a breakdown of. Of, you know, where your time is spent on average. But just before we get to that question, maybe I think, Justin, if you want to say good morning to some people in the chat. [00:16:19] Speaker C: I do, because everyone's here. I'll just quickly run through them. William Kale, new face. I think I'll be watching. Please do. Please subscribe too. That'd be nice. [00:16:27] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:16:27] Speaker C: Wookie, Good to see you. Nick Fletcher. [00:16:30] Speaker A: Good morning. [00:16:30] Speaker C: LTK Tintype man. Philip Johnson. David Mascara from San Francisco. [00:16:35] Speaker B: Bruce Moyle. [00:16:37] Speaker C: Good morning, all. Jumping in and back out on a job. Just wanted to say hi to Peter, who helped me define my lighting back in the day. Tony's only here to talk sim racing. He's. Tony's a friend of mine. We actually. We'll talk about it later. But I actually got my first go in a sim just on Sunday. I was telling you about your setup that I saw on YouTube. So I'll talk about later. Hey, Tony, Tint up man says Peter's my favorite YouTube channel. Even better than yours, Justin. Looking forward to this. Sorry, it's not. Hey, you know, it's. It's fair. David. David Mascara says, good to see Jim. Nick on Odyssey back. It is. [00:17:18] Speaker A: Hey, Jim. [00:17:21] Speaker C: Yeah. Anyway, Nick's making fun of him. Phil Thompson. Good to see you. Lisa Leach. Glenn Lavender says it's opposed, not the person. Great way to phrase it. Yeah, that was. That was pretty good. I think this podcast has started off hot. It's awesome. And Dennis Smith. Hey, Peter, thanks for the wild YouTube channel. It's always been inspirational to me on many levels. [00:17:46] Speaker A: Well, thank you very much. [00:17:47] Speaker C: Finally. Yeah, yeah, Dennis is. Dennis is all over it. Rodney Nicholson, Arthur L. And Julie Powell. Good to have you all here. [00:17:57] Speaker B: Good morning, everybody. [00:17:58] Speaker A: Morning. [00:17:59] Speaker B: Thanks for joining us. And look, if you are new here. This is your first time watching. Perhaps you've hopped on because you've heard that Peter's joining us today. We don't blame you for that. But give us a like on YouTube. It certainly helps out a lot. It helps other people know that we're doing this sort of content and also subscribe. It's free. If you just hit the subscribe button, tickle the bell icon so you'll get notified in your time zone is to win. Our episodes going live, which is twice a week, it's every Thursday morning, 9am Australian Eastern Daylight or standard time, depending on the time of year. And then every Monday evening we have our random photography show where we talk news, reviews, unboxings and much, much more. Especially looking at your images that you send into us. And that's Every Monday evening, 7.30pm Australian Eastern Daylight or standard time. So, yeah, welcome. [00:18:43] Speaker A: Welcome to everyone. Yeah, back to the show. [00:18:47] Speaker B: You mentioned earlier that. Well, a couple of things that have, that have kind of stuck out for me is that, you know, you talked about your past businesses and you've talked a little bit about how you were shooting weddings, parties, anything to make a dollar. I imagine that that was in your early stages of your career. Can you take us back to that time? And you know, I think I know for me personally, I can't speak for everyone, but when I first picked up a digital camera to actually make something of it, I like, I just shot whatever I shot whatever I could, more as a learning curve than anything, but also to make some money to pay for the gear. Tell us about that time for you. What was that? What was that experience like? And how did that then lead you into where you are now? [00:19:31] Speaker A: I'd been one thing people don't realize. I'd been shooting since I was about 15. So when parents bought me my first camera, I was into music. So all I wanted to do was create record covers, as you can imagine. And I started off with a. My first camera was a little Kodak Instamatic, that little square pop flash you got four flashes out of that was it basically two switches on it. That's all. And I still can't believe the photos I took with that camera. As I got a little bit older, I used to steal dad's Manolta and he had big Mets flash on it. And I'd go to rock concerts because I looked like a photographer. They put me in the mosh pit. Back in those days, the mosh pit was where photographers were, not where you got killed. And because I Was a long haired skinny geek. Like I had hair down in my ass. I was stick skinny. I just stood out and I was very gothic. I wore nothing but black. I think the first break I had was Chuck Berry. I was at their concert, Festival hall and bouncers come down, grabbed me and I thought, oh, shit, they found out I'm not real and walked me around and walked me up the side of the stage and walked me onto stage. And Chuck Berry told me to sit next to his guitar so I could photograph him doing the Chuck Berry walk with the crowd behind him. Oh, wow. So for the whole. For I'd say 70% of the gig, I spent it on stage shooting. [00:20:59] Speaker C: Awesome. And you weren't there in any official capacity. You were just sort of shooting for yourself. No, that's unreal. [00:21:06] Speaker A: So I was. I was so lucky with everything that happened in those years. I went to Status Quo. They kept on doing their whole thing over the top of me because again, I look so different to all the other guys. But then at the end of that show, they took all my film off me. I got my name and I got. And I was only 15 at the time and I was just, oh, I shouldn't be doing this. Then they got my name, my phone number and it wasn't like mobiles, there's no such thing as that anymore. It's basically my parents number. And my mum's come to school and picked me up and said, what have you done? I said, what do you mean? So we've got to go into a solicitor's office in the city. So we went in there and there's two big guys there and they're saying that you took the photos at the Status Quo concert. This box here is all the developed pictures. Eight by ten for you. We just need you to sign this piece of paper so we can use them and keep the rest. And me being 15, I get these photos and two of them are signed by Status Quo. My own art. So little things like that. And yeah, stupid me because I just sold my copyright, but who cares at 15. Yeah, some. Some of the photos on Status Quo Live cover is on the album. My photos. Not only. I know that I don't care. Doesn't worry me. I've never been an attention seeker for that stuff. I just know myself. So that sort of. All of those years, that was all film. Yeah. I never had any light meter. It was all learning. And when you have to work with bands live on stages. And I did Sunbury, I did all the, the big plays, I Was lucky enough to photograph Queen three times. I've got the amount of bands. I got the shot. David Coverdale from Deep Purple grabbed my camera off me, le ty grab it and I'm thinking, oh, they smash guitars. And this is dad's camera. [00:22:59] Speaker C: Oh, no. [00:23:00] Speaker A: And he went around and shot all the band members and hand it back to me. Yeah, he just didn't think to focus once, but that doesn't matter. [00:23:08] Speaker C: I was gonna say, did the photos work at all or no? [00:23:10] Speaker A: No, they're just a blurry mess. [00:23:13] Speaker C: Still cool. Still very cool. [00:23:16] Speaker A: A lot of my. A lot of my learning was not school, not books. There's no YouTube, there's no Internet. It was just go out. I'd do things like I would. Wanted to play with depth of field and I'd write some stuff on paper. But when the film came back, I couldn't work out which slide, which picture was what picture, because one was missing or there was two black rolls. So it never worked great. So you just end up. I don't know. It was much harder and much easier back then. [00:23:48] Speaker C: It's insane. The difference in learning speed. I've said often, because I didn't start photography until I was really close to 30, late 20s, I can't remember, but it was. I started on digital and I don't think I would have made it starting on film. I don't think I would have got through the slower learning curve, the slower, more meticulous learning curve, rather than being able to just take a photo look on the back of the screen. Oh, that's what that does. Oh, that's what that does. You know, like. [00:24:17] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. [00:24:17] Speaker C: It is completely different, isn't it? It's the time to wait to get a film back and. [00:24:23] Speaker B: But also, life was slower back then. You know, I learned film photography at art school. Everything was slower. We didn't have Internet, we didn't have socials, we didn't have Ubers. Everything was, you know, everything was. Had to work at a pace that matched the era. [00:24:37] Speaker A: Yeah, 100. And when getting back to your original question, So I was working for a lifestyle magazine and I'd say 80 of the period of time I was working with them. I was still on film. They didn't like digital. My first digital camera, and I think this is why I still don't like them today, was a Fuji. [00:25:02] Speaker B: Sorry, I just got to meet you. [00:25:04] Speaker A: For a little while, Peter. Sorry. [00:25:07] Speaker C: So, yeah, how early was it? [00:25:10] Speaker A: This is going back a long time. I'm too old to even remember dates, but my the first time I was able to get the magazine to use any digital photography at all. It was a Canon. I think it was either a D60 or a 6D or something like that. It was a 4 or 6 megapixel. It cost nearly $10,000 back in the day. It was just equivalent to the EOS one. It was that quality built. It was only 4 or 6 megapixels. It was a beautiful camera. And even then I had a lot of trouble getting the magazines. They kept on saying the color's not right. The thing was I was so used to. We were shooting Velvia and Provia and things like that. I was so used to false colors. They couldn't handle real color. And that's what digital gave us. But making that transition, I did a shoot for the magazine. Well, it was a really long story. I won't break it down but I did a freak shoot out in Highlands essentially Tasmania in absolute blizzard. Columbia Clothing saw the shot. They said we haven't got this in production yet. We need to get this out now. They quickly need the studio shot. They said the guy, whoever shot that can do it will pay for him. I had no idea about studios had no idea whatso I said to the. The editor of the magazine. I've got no idea in studios it's just me. So we've got studio. We're supplying somebody do all of that for you. You're just more like the button pusher and the art director. So when in there I had a mile and a female had an absolute ball. Couldn't believe I can now control light. What I can make it brighter and darker and play with the background which you just. I had never had that ability. So just in there and I got home that night and said to my wife honey, we're going to go broke. I want to be a fashion photographer. And literally that night I said it. And within a month I stopped working with a magazine. I'd found a very cheap studio. It was actually even had a psych in it. It was a hundred dollars a week. [00:27:24] Speaker B: What. [00:27:25] Speaker A: And it was about. It was 4 meter ceilings. It had a psych. It was about I think 15 meters by about 10 meters. Might have been 20 meters by 10. It was a long. Pretty much where I am now right through window. It was in an arcade from a major shopping center to the railway station. Right. And I had glass windows the whole way along there. And it was because I going to bulldoze this whole thing down. They could only give a short term lease. [00:27:57] Speaker C: Okay. [00:27:57] Speaker A: I Think I was there for four years. Should have only been one. And then I had to leave. And that's when I got this place. But the studio is still sitting there unused. 17. 17 years later it is still sitting there unused. [00:28:16] Speaker C: The development hasn't happened. It hasn't. No. [00:28:18] Speaker A: Government stuffed it all up. Yeah. It was supposed to be government money. They've done all the other developments a week. It was a hundred dollars a week. Oh my gosh. So. And even in the studio space. Yeah, yeah, I could afford that even with that. I had. There was a lady that taught me makeup. Most people don't know a makeup artist, but as. And she was across the other side. And this is why I saw this spot. She had a little makeup school in there. And she then subbed some of my room because she didn't need the size she had. And I didn't realize she was so high up in the fashion industry. So she got doors opening for me very quick. Very within the first year of being in there. I was shooting Angelina Boccini and Joan Hill. Do. [00:29:08] Speaker C: Do you think having your own studio. [00:29:09] Speaker A: Was a big like help in accelerating 100%. And I don't wish it on anybody because it is a nightmare once you've got it. You're worrying about your camera gear. Now you got all the studio gear. Now you're thinking about props and you. It's just never. And then you haven't got enough room for anything. So you need something bigger like this stupid place. This doesn't cost me $100 a week. I bet the re. By having your own space that you can just walk into it and it's your space. You're not sharing it with anybody else. Means when you leave and when you come back next next it's exactly the same. And you can waste days learning. [00:29:51] Speaker C: When you're not on the clock paying an hourly rate at a studio, trying to learn to a test shoot or something like that. [00:29:56] Speaker A: You can't. While you've got. You can't. You need to be able to sit back and breathe and look and would say, what. What am I doing with these images? These look so amateur. And I set myself. I always set myself very high goals. I'm one of these people that if I'm going to do something, I do it properly or I don't do it at all. I gave up fishing. I gave up golf. I've given up a few things in my life. I haven't given up music. I still love music. Not I can't play it the way I Want. I want to be like Getty Lee. I could never play as good as him. I don't know if you know what I'm talking about on the Best Bass Players in the World from Rush. [00:30:31] Speaker C: Okay. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. [00:30:33] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:30:33] Speaker C: I didn't know him by name, but I know the. [00:30:35] Speaker A: No, the band Rush. [00:30:36] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:30:38] Speaker A: And I could never, never play as good as him. So it got me frustrated. But when it comes to writing, that was. I could still do that. So that's why I still do music today. And with the joy of computers, I can build on that. [00:30:50] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:30:51] Speaker A: But back on to those days. So I had this nice studio space at my fingertips. I had some pretty cheap shit gear, except I had two good quality lights and I did a book many years ago for in fly fishing. And I had to photograph the entire. All the macro shots of all the flies for fly fishing. And I went and saw Rod and they used to be called Beltronics in Richmond, which end up being Sun Studios. And so rodding there. And he told me all the right stuff to do. He said no, nor this shit. Ignore this. Just this, these two Visi tech lights which was a cheap version of Broncolor. He said if you just do this, do this and I could shoot. I shot the entire book just with those. Had no problems at all. I ended up being a customer. There's forever. Like I bought my first Scoro pack through there. All my Broncolor stuff through them. Rod always looked after me until he became Santa Claus. He retired and ended up being a Santa Claus at shopping centers. So funny really. I had two models come and sit on his knee. Knee one year. He didn't even know we were coming in. [00:32:08] Speaker C: That's awesome. [00:32:10] Speaker A: Anyway, back then that was all the lighting gear I had. I then started buying some cheap Chinese crap, but that's all I could afford. And as long as you've got one good light, it doesn't matter if your other lights vary a little bit and the color's not quite right and they go pop every now and then as long as your main light can work. And it was just a matter of slowly developing. And a few times I got diverted listening to the wrong people or thinking this is what I like. But it wasn't. The very, very amazing Canadian French portrait photographer whose wife used to over paint in Corel over the portraits. Literally paint over the digital thing with Corel. But they had that very old fashioned portrait look. And he would use up to 15 lights and he'd light it completely with a light meter. And I Assisted him for three days in Melbourne when he was doing some talks and he had some commercial work and I learned, he taught me all these tricks. We just clicked straight away. So. And yeah, I went deep into that. But then it became too technical. And yes, I got the most incredible lighting, but the model couldn't move a millimeter because she did. That little eyelight is now coming to her ear. And you had no soul in your pictures. It was very much. It's nearly like AI before AI started. It was soulless, perfectly portraited. And that's not who I am. I, I want something broken. So I just pretty much having the space I had, having the windows I had, I just had big black curtains on them. But I hung pictures in those windows and changed them every single week. Properly framed pictures. I made it. So I, the pictures were all at. I think it was a two size. And I had the frames made so I can take the back off, just drop a new frame and put it back in the frame and put it up there. So I didn't have the expense. And quite often I just peer out through the gap in the curtains and there'd be six or seven people slowly walking, looking at the photos and I'd be just my art and those type of things any amount of times. Knock on the door, is that for sale or do you do baby shots? Do you do weddings? Another thing I did whenever I went anywhere, I made sure the person who I was interacting with knew I was a photographer by the time I left. Without me saying, hey, by the way, I'm a photographer. Yeah, just simple little things, working ways in a conversation. So I go, oh, so what do you do for a living? [00:34:47] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:34:48] Speaker A: And I picked up three model portfolio shoots from girls who are checkout chicks. And it wasn't them, it was their sisters or a family friend member. It was just like Sud would buy model food, which was predominantly, you know, lollies and things like that. Things that models can eat while they've got lipstick on. So they've been shooting for two hours. They need some sugar so to have jars outside, go. I'll say, this isn't for me, it's for work. Oh, so what do you do for work? Bang. [00:35:19] Speaker C: Yeah, it's like, it's, it's like what people would call networking, but it's not, it's just, it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's just getting that out there to as many avenues as possible. You know, you're not trying to, you're not like, I'm going to try and find the. The big movers and shakers and introduce myself to them. It's just letting everyone know what you do and those connections flow. [00:35:42] Speaker A: Yeah. Very little in my life I've spent money on advertising. I think most of it's waste of money. Unless you're trying to build brand names and things like that. You just want, you know, Coca Cola. Coca Cola. You plaster everywhere. But what I have learned is as soon as you know it's an advertisement, you turn off. [00:36:00] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:36:01] Speaker A: Doesn't matter where it comes up, you just turn off straight away. So I learned very quickly to try and do smart advertising. So my front window in that studio collected a lot of people and I picked up one of my biggest clients I've ever had off that front window. Lady just walked in. We're just setting up a new mortgage brokering firm around the corner. It's just three of us, four of us. We just need some corporate headshots. So I went down and saw them go and do mortgage brokering. Nobody ever heard of them. Went in there, did some shots. They wanted something a little bit different. I said, well, everybody's boring with their corporate stuff, so you need your corporate shot. But people, especially when it comes to lawyers and banks and people like that, people are really not trusting. So why don't we just have a separate picture where we actually photograph you as who you really are. So if you're into soccer, we're going to put you in your soccer clothing, put you on a soccer field. If you're into your family, you're going to have your family in the picture. If you're into bike riding, we're going to put you in your bike gear, helmet on with your bike. We're just going to find who you are and use that. So there's a talking point straight away in the meeting. Oh, so you like riding. And I did that with them. I ended up doing, I'd say, more than 500 corporate headshots for that company. [00:37:31] Speaker C: Holy moly. [00:37:33] Speaker A: They're called Mortgage First. They grew like wildfire. That was their first office. That was the beginning of their company. Yes. [00:37:42] Speaker C: Oh, my gosh. [00:37:43] Speaker A: And even the original directors, because it's all been bought out now, even them today. One is in Queensland. I'm not sure where the other one is right now. They still contact me every now and then for a photo shoot. [00:37:55] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:37:56] Speaker A: Right. So number one is it's getting the people in, but then it's supplying them with a service that nobody else gives them. It gives them true advice Give them good ideas. And at the end of the day, they love the fact I wanted to show everybody who they were. Not just this is a picture, you know, this is their soul. And it works so well for their business. A great idea. Yeah. [00:38:21] Speaker C: It's a great angle. [00:38:22] Speaker A: That's for sure. That's for sure. Do I need to break for a minute? Sorry, I can talk underwater. [00:38:30] Speaker C: No, I'm just making notes. This is like. [00:38:34] Speaker A: Yeah. So another, another little thing I did whenever I was doing sort of, you know, daughters, the shots for the mother of their daughter. So, you know, 14, 15. Yeah, there's all those type of shots, the portrait type stuff. I would find their favorite picture and I had a pre Action built into Photoshop that turned it into business cards with my. All my details on it. So it was their daughter with all my details on it onto a nice hard card or just get 10 free. They're never going to throw that away, are they? They're certainly going to pass it to somebody. [00:39:11] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:39:12] Speaker A: That's advertising in the world. The amount of work I got out for 10 minutes work, customize business cards. [00:39:21] Speaker C: With the photo of the client. [00:39:24] Speaker A: Kids, the best picture from that thing. So I gave it to the client. That's one or two. Client goes, oh, you can't use it. No, no, these are, these are the only 10. They're yours. [00:39:35] Speaker C: Yeah, that is, I'm, I'm writing that down. I'm trying to, to launch a new business this year. A pet photography business. That's genius. That is like if it's their dog on the business card. From there, from that, like. Okay, There was comments. Just quickly. Sorry. There was actually comments in here asking about business cards. I know that's prompted Roy Bigsby was asking, does anyone else still hand out business card or am I just old? And the only reply in the chat was Samantha Olson saying, I still hand them out because I had 4,000 made, so I have no choice. Do you still use business cards now at all, Peter? [00:40:17] Speaker A: I still have them with me. So when you bump into somebody, how do you show me Instagram? How do you show me your web page quickly? Yeah, here's a card on my business card. Don't have one on my desk. On my business card has a QR code. So all I have to do is that they're on my website. It's that simple. [00:40:37] Speaker B: Yeah, we did that for our lucky straps cards. [00:40:39] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:40:40] Speaker B: We went to the Bright festival of photography last year. Oh, in the year before. I think we had them with the QR code and people and then it would come to the podcast, it would go to our product website, it would go to our personal bios. It was. Yeah. Such a great tool. [00:40:54] Speaker A: I had mine printed 12 years ago. [00:40:57] Speaker C: Do you really? [00:40:58] Speaker A: Yes. Like, it won the first. No, I didn't have that many. I don't hand out that money. Many. But the QR code was a whole new thing, everyone thought. And the other day I scanned it myself. This still couldn't work. And bank took me straight to my web page. Even though I've had my web page change four times in. It's still the same address, so it still took me there. [00:41:20] Speaker C: Exactly. It's all URL based. Yeah. They almost died. And then covert kind of re. Re. Energized the QR code. [00:41:30] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:41:30] Speaker C: Before we started our. Like Jim and I shot weddings together, before we started our wedding business, I worked at a marketing agency and. And we. We used to laugh because QR codes had become popular and then they were sort of becoming use and clients were saying, oh, should we put a QR code on this poster? And we're like, just put the website on there. Like, no one. [00:41:52] Speaker A: Like, why. [00:41:53] Speaker C: Why would you want a QR code on there? It's just some trendy thing. That's nothing. And that was. That would have been in like 2012, maybe. [00:42:01] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:42:01] Speaker C: And then. Yeah. All of a sudden, all these years later, they become very, very useful for a broader population. And they got adopted so that people would actually. Because no one was scanning them back then. No one knew what to do with it. But now it's. It's ubiquitous. It's. Yeah. It's quite crazy that. Jim's right. They sort of almost paid it off until. Until I guess, Covid. What, what, what did covert bring them back? Oh, yeah. [00:42:30] Speaker B: Accommodate them. And then it just stopped. [00:42:32] Speaker A: Oh. [00:42:32] Speaker B: So. Yeah. [00:42:33] Speaker A: But now. Now too. As soon as now. I hate them because it reminds me of shitty restaurants. [00:42:39] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:42:41] Speaker A: They want me to look at the menu on my phone. I have dyslexia. Small writing messes me. And you can only fit so much on a phone. I just think, how. Why, you know, I'm all about service. Just give us a menu. Give a menu. [00:42:58] Speaker C: You should always have a printed menu. You can have an optional phone menu for people that like that if you want. But always printed. Yeah. [00:43:04] Speaker A: Beck wants the menu. In fact, Becca wants a menu a week before so she can study it before we get there. We're in London. We went to a ramen place. I ended up getting a cold salad. I thought I was ordering ramen. Because I was on the stupid phone thing. I couldn't read it properly, that one, and it was horrible. And then all I got was hung on me by Beck and her fiance. Why are you eating that? Anyway? Okay, yeah, quick other little diversions. Some industries are very, very hard to get into. As a photographer. No, F1 photography. Good luck with that. Right. So you've got to try and find the back door. And what I found is I really wanted to get into fashion, but pretty much nobody was going to touch you if they didn't. If you didn't have something. Sending magazines, not gonna, you know, Chadwicks or Vivians aren't going to give you models. What you used to shoot fishermen. It's got, you know, you're just not going to get anything. And I found that in the fashion industry. Sorry, that was mine. [00:44:19] Speaker C: That's okay, you can take it. [00:44:21] Speaker A: No, it's just my daughter. No, I put on a flight mode. I don't know why I got through. Yeah, so with the fashion industry is very, very hard. You really need your name seen for 10 years before anybody will even book you. The fashion shoots. $2,000 an hour. Think about carefully. Do you want to risk $2,000 an hour on a photographer doesn't know what they're doing? So what I found is there's a lot of alternative fashion. So there's the clubwear, the goths, the emos, all of this area. There's the pinup. And they're dying for photographers. And even into the fetish wear, Reactor rubber and some of those companies, they ended up being really big companies for me in the end, but they got me the break in because Gallery Serpentine in Sydney, another one Victoriana, all the lace up and that. As long as you look like you can take a decent picture, they'll just throw clothes at you to build your own folio. You get a good picture, next minute it's being published in all the gothic magazines. It's all happening without you even trying. All right, you're not getting paid any money, but they're just giving you some clothes and you're shooting it and giving back to them when it comes to now them asking you, I never did anything for nothing. Because if a client doesn't pay you the first time, they will never pay. Best things like bands. We'll look after you as we get really big. So you shoot the Chili Peppers before anybody knows about them. All of a sudden they get a contract. They've now got $100,000 for photography. Let's find the Biggest name photographer in the world. They're not going to drag you back out. You're the free one. [00:46:05] Speaker C: It's so interesting. In a past life, I was a sound engineer and I used to play in bands and stuff like that. Recording engineer, you'd know. [00:46:11] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:46:12] Speaker C: So it was, it was the same with recording engineers. They would, they would work for free to record a band's album, do the whole thing. Band get signed to Sony. Next album produced in a studio with a famous. They pick a famous, you know, producer and sound engineer because they want to level up their sound. And you're like, okay, I guess that's how it is, you know, like, you're the free guy. You're the. Yeah, that's. [00:46:37] Speaker A: Most people won't even know the band I'm going to mention, but there's a band called Dear Enemy and the engineer that end up doing our band, he used to be their engineer and he'd only work with us when they weren't playing. And he was amazing live engineer, like incredible. And make any room sound down. Good. They got their record deal. I got it. They dumped him overnight. [00:46:58] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:46:59] Speaker A: It's just crazy. And he did all. He'd do three or four gigs a week. I only get paid for one of them, you know. [00:47:06] Speaker C: Do you know the band? Do you know the band Parkway Drive? [00:47:08] Speaker A: Yeah, of course. I love Parkway Drive. [00:47:10] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:47:12] Speaker A: Oh, you used to near them? [00:47:15] Speaker C: No. Well, we did actually open for them once. Oh, cool. Yeah, but. But I always have to say this. We organized. It was in Bendigo where. And we organized the gig, brought them to town, so we like ran the whole thing. So we obviously we put ourselves on the show. So we didn't. I mean, we opened for them, but no one, no one asked us to open for them. It was your own personal. Anyway, that's what I was saying. They're, they're. They had an issue way early on when they were like just young with one of their quad boxes for one of the guitar amps. And a dude, one of their fans and friends ripped some electrical wire out of the wall, like from a power outlet plug. Pulled the plug out, pulled the wire out, fixed the speaker cabinet. That guy who was a apprentice Sparky at the time, is now their full production tour manager, like for their light shows. Everything. He has grown with them in his, like, skills and everything. As they got bigger, he got bit, like, got more skilled. As their shows got more complex, he got more capable and he's still like, that's, that's the only time I've Heard of those stories where they've. [00:48:25] Speaker A: No, it definitely worked out. No, it definitely happens the other way. We. My brother was our lighting guy for our band and we were touring with Sudoeco for about six months as their backup and they gave us half the PA and a third of the light show. My brother's fully self taught on lighting. Had no idea what to do. He just was a roadie for a bit and then he started doing lighting after the first night. We did pseudo echo. Their managers wanted to grab my brother as their lighting guy and they would have taken him on completely un skilled, untrained and everything. Only had half the lighting rig. He reckons he did so much better job than his super paid one. So it does work the other way when people see the skill. [00:49:09] Speaker C: Yeah. You just never know who. [00:49:11] Speaker A: You never know. [00:49:12] Speaker C: Yeah. You never know how it's going to go. Yeah. [00:49:14] Speaker B: And I think that's a really nice loop back to the business card idea that you never know who's going to. [00:49:20] Speaker A: Be headed that card. Yeah. You never know. [00:49:23] Speaker B: It could be the job that, you know, sets you up for the rest of your life. [00:49:26] Speaker A: Or at least you never know. People forget. You never know who you're sitting next to. [00:49:32] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:49:33] Speaker A: And I was having a drink with a guy in a bar in la. This is years ago and we shouldn't even been in this bar because we're trying to get back home and all of a sudden two hours has gone. I haven't paid for a single drink all night. And I've been talking to this guy that was so interesting. He turns out to be Madonna's hair designer, not the person who does the hairdressing. He designs the hair outfits and how the hair's going to be. And he's very close friends with Baz Lohman. The second he walked out of the bar, the bar crew, the bar was like a Coyote Ugly bar. It was a really cool night. But they rent. Who are you? Who are. He doesn't talk to anybody. Right. So you never know who you're sitting next to. [00:50:22] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:50:23] Speaker A: Yeah. So you just treat everybody as this could be a future client. You just don't know. So especially if you're running a business and especially if you've got your business name on a car. Never, never get road rage. Never beep your horn, let people in. That's all right. That's right. Go for it, you idiot. [00:50:48] Speaker C: It's so true. I quickly, before we get too derailed, I want to go back to talking about. You're talking about free shoot. So you would shoot for free when you off. You would offer your services for free when you wanted to do that work. But if a client, if someone ever. [00:51:04] Speaker A: Asked you, if the client approached me, it's paid. Even if it was I really, really, really want to do this job. I'll just say, look, I have to have. These two lights are going to cost me a hundred dollars to rent for the day. Can you play for half of it? [00:51:18] Speaker B: Even if. [00:51:18] Speaker C: Even if it was a little fee. [00:51:21] Speaker A: Just something get them used to paying, then they will always be used to paying for your service. [00:51:28] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. But if you reach out to them and yeah, if I'm reaching out to have this idea different. [00:51:35] Speaker A: So yeah, the. And it. Everything's worked but worked in my favor beautifully with say Gallery Serpentine, which are quite a big. Or not so much anymore. But they were pretty much industry standard for Victoriana goth ware and things like that. The first I was surprised. I even let me borrow some. Some gowns because they're worth a fortune. But she said we're seeing your work, really love it. Yeah. You're welcome to. But can we have a couple of pictures? That's all it was. So they had nothing to do with the shoot. And we shot in his antique. A very old cemetery in Sydney near Newtown. And it's decommissioned, which means I think the youngest Graves 150 years old. [00:52:21] Speaker C: Wow. Wow. [00:52:22] Speaker A: So there's no living and there's people going in and have picnics on the gravestones. Half the gravestones are collapsed and fall into holes and that. But we did this beautiful sort of Victoriana gothy shoot in the graveyard in the middle of the day. And she just loved the picture so much. She then booked me to shoot her stuff for a catalog and it was a full page. Then two doors up the road from her was a latex company called Reactor Rubber. They. We booked out the RSL two doors up the road. I put down a white piece of seamless paper and shot their entire catalog online. Never. It was only because she said, oh, this photographer here is in town for another couple of days. You should grab him. [00:53:06] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:53:07] Speaker A: And now we paid jobs. And then those photos, the photos. Some of those photos have became famous more in the fashion industry than opened the door for me to get into more traditional fashion. But then I hate most of the traditional. I want to be the. The edgy, messed up stuff. So. Yeah. And. [00:53:26] Speaker B: And just with your body of work, let's talk about at the moment and how maybe we can talk about how that's morphed over the years. But what's the percentage breakdown of where you spend your time roughly? You know, you talked about you've got a lot of private corporate work or commercial work. [00:53:44] Speaker A: Sorry, at the moment our. Right now our books are closed. [00:53:49] Speaker B: Right. [00:53:49] Speaker A: So if someone sends an email or rings up, Sorry, our books are closed. Unless it's a client I've worked for in the past and I really like working for them, literally. So where. I can't work with art directors anymore. I can't work with stupid clients anymore. I just can't. It's just, It's. I don't need to. If I want to retire, I could retire today. I won't because I'd be bored. [00:54:16] Speaker C: What a good place to be in that. You can just do what you want to do. [00:54:19] Speaker A: And. But that's what you've got to. That's what you should be aiming as a photographer. And if you look at some. Even when we're talking to wedding photographers, I know too, they only do the weddings they want to do. They look at the type of client before they even let them, even before they say what they're going to charge. And then the wedding is shot the way they want it shot. And it's not like lots of weddings. The book is written before you even get in there. We're going to get this shot, this shot, this shot. We're going to put a light behind them and run a fountain in the background. We're going to do this, all of these things. Which is not really their wedding day. It's a production shoot. The two photographers I know that makes still amazing money. They walk in there with no idea in the world what's going to happen. And they shoot it like paparazzi and I have a ball and they create things that are going to happen. They will stir something to happen, right? Yeah. They'll purposely say to say one of the. The bridesmaids go down there and just tell the bride that she's got a rip in the back of her dress. So you imagine what the bride's going to do that split second. So he's got all these little, little bits of drama to get these really natural, beautiful shots. And then when the bride looks back at the photo, she goes, yeah, that's when the photographer figure told. Right. There's a story behind it. Whereas that beautiful setup shot with the fountain in the background, all of that, they go, yeah, we had to stand there for 10 minutes while the photographer messed around with lighting. You know, that doesn't. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:55:56] Speaker C: That no one wants to do that. No one. They. They want the cool photos, but they do not want their day to be a photo shoot. [00:56:02] Speaker A: Photo shoot. 100. [00:56:04] Speaker C: Some do. Some do, but they're the worst. They do. [00:56:08] Speaker A: Yeah. One of my nephews got married and everything was planned out to the T. Like the guests were sitting for two hours waiting for him to finish their photo shoot. It was on this cliff. It was a helicopter. It was this. And yeah, it was just. Yeah, yeah. [00:56:26] Speaker C: It's a production like you say. [00:56:27] Speaker B: Yeah, it is a production. [00:56:28] Speaker C: It's not a day. [00:56:29] Speaker A: The funniest thing of the whole. They did the whole champagne flute. [00:56:35] Speaker C: Tell me it fell down. [00:56:37] Speaker A: No, no. They set it all up and they had the bride and groom doing it all to the camera with a crowd behind. So they weren't even looking at the crowd. All their friends and that were not even involved in this moment. [00:56:49] Speaker C: Yeah. So it was just for the photo. [00:56:52] Speaker A: It was just the backdrop. [00:56:54] Speaker C: People do some weird things. [00:56:55] Speaker A: Yeah, I know. [00:56:56] Speaker C: That's crazy. I wonder if that was the photographer that directed that too. That's. That's, that's. [00:57:04] Speaker A: I would say that might have been 50. 50. [00:57:06] Speaker C: Yeah, that's. I mean, yeah, it's cool photo, but it's not. Yeah, it's. What are we doing? [00:57:11] Speaker A: Yeah, so in. What I'm saying is that person rang me. That would be, sorry, our books are closed. Because that is not the type of work I like to do. If I get somebody else, ring me. And it might be a really low end budget climber. Oh, that'd be freaking awesome to do. How much scope have I got? How much freedom have I got? The more freedom I get, the more I want to do it. [00:57:33] Speaker C: Yeah. So in the evolution of your, your career, you know, the last 20 years, you have done a lot of commercial work that, that you say we. We can't see. And I can't find it anywhere I looked. I've seen you. You mentioned cars, motorbikes, furniture. I saw on your studio tour, you had these epic. I can't remember what they were called. The lights that are basically like on gantries in your roof. [00:58:02] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, that's giant. That's called the mega light. That's a mega light. So that is 6.3 meters by 2.8 meter softball. [00:58:12] Speaker C: I thought it might be close to 6 meters. I was about it yesterday and I was like, it was massive. [00:58:17] Speaker B: You had that custom made or. [00:58:19] Speaker A: No, it's had eight heads in it. It's got. It's all still up there. It's got eight heads in the Top of it. And there's four scoro packs up in the roof. It's fully tracked. It's all remote controlled. You can have it this way. You can have it stand on edge. We did a LEGO spaceship, full rocket, six meter high rocket. We sat. That's how we lit it. We set it like on side of the rocket and lit it from the side. Great for motorbikes, not. Not as good for cars. It was great for motorbikes and furniture and things like that. It was originally in Sun Studios in Richmond and it was worth about $120,000 when it came out. So that same with the para that's sitting behind me. They. The Paris scene behind me is a. I think it was about 25,000 without a light or without the stand. [00:59:15] Speaker C: Wow. [00:59:15] Speaker A: So with the big one. Not long after we got this place, Rod from Sun Studios came out and visited me. And we're having a chat. I already had heaps of lighting, so it wasn't. He just wanted to see the space. He rang me up one day and he said, you know our mega light? He said, we, we want you to buy it. I said, of course you do. What, your sales a bit low, is it because. No, it's become a white elephant because their ceilings aren't that high. Most of their rental didn't even want it in there because you can't just pull it down. It was taking height out of the ceiling. He said, if you pick it up, you can have it for $10,000. I said, hang on a minute. I can just take the lights, the packs and sell it for 20 or 25. Let's do whatever you like. So we went there. It took us a day to dismantle it and remove it, and then took us nearly four days to get it put in here, which has to be laser levels because the little motors are just little welding motors. So they're really low power. So everything has to be perfect. And, you know, it cost me $10,000 higher of a truck and then about five days of my time. So it was in the same. The. The power behind me. I was doing a lot of beauty at the time. I just wanted to get the 181.8 meter one for beauty headshots, get it right in close so they're just literally flooded with light. And Rod said, oh, we've got the 3.3. I said, no, no, I just want. This is just the hit because it kept on going on. Well, I'll bring you out the 3.3. And no, I said, don't bother with it. I said I'm not because I'll sell it to you for a thousand dollars cheaper than the 180. So we'll bring it out. Then I, he, he set it up straight away. I took three pictures of it, did two other two things and took another three pictures. I told him to take the 180 away. Now I never use it. And it's the best. The thing that people don't realize with the big paras, it's like a magnifying glass. And what I mean by that is if you've got the sun and you're burning ants like you do with a kid chasing ant man trying to burn them, but you can put your finger halfway between. It doesn't burn, does it? Not only burns where the focus. What I can do with that is have it back off the white psych by about 8 meters and I can overexpose the wall and not overexpose the white wedding gown halfway in between. Tell me any other light you can do that? [01:01:52] Speaker B: Yeah, it's pretty amazing. [01:01:54] Speaker A: I can throw power of the light behind because it's focusing the parabolics of focus. And it's not when you see the actual pictures of it or even if you just stand in there and turn the modeling light on, you'll see it's 16 dots. It's not just fully lit, it's just 16 dots. And as you walk back and forward, those dots move in and out. And as you wind your light in and out, the dots will move. And that's what's lighting you that circle, not the whole dish. [01:02:24] Speaker C: Interesting. Okay, look at me, look at me Googling the cheapest parabolic. [01:02:29] Speaker A: No, you don't. The problem is once you get, once you get below, the 1.8s are all right. They won't do. They're not big enough to do what I'm doing. So I mainly have the distance. Distance. Yeah, you haven't got that width. What I'm mainly use it for, and I hardly do it anymore is high key fashion. And it's when you're shooting, say, say if I was doing a bridal shoot and they wanted it on white. So I've got the jewel, I've got all the silk, everything. I can shoot that on white. And you can see every single bit of tool. [01:03:08] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [01:03:08] Speaker A: It takes me an hour to an hour and a half to set up that. I have four lights onto the background which are bounced into V flats. I then have an octa above. Then I have this thing sitting behind me. And in tuned in to light the dead center of them only not to touch the walls. And literally it takes me about an hour to an hour and a half to set that lighting up. And I've been doing it for years. You've just got to the whole wall. I have to get the Wall sitting at 240 to 254. I go over my wall. I go over my wall with an eyedropper tool. If I can find 255, I have to adjust the lights because once you see 255, you don't know what it is. [01:03:54] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:03:54] Speaker A: He says no, 256 makes sense. A254. I know I don't have a little hot spot on the wall which is going to flare out some of the jewelry. [01:04:05] Speaker C: Damn. [01:04:06] Speaker A: And all this technical stuff. I didn't learn this through YouTube. I didn't learn this. This is just hours and hours and hours of work. [01:04:16] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:04:16] Speaker A: If you want to be a great photographer, it takes time. There's no shortcut. As much as I would love to have shortcuts to learn, I'm about to start. I've been using logic pro forma sound work for years and years. I'm about to go on to Ableton. Oh, my God, it's killing me. I'm doing what I tell everybody not to do. I think I've wasted 20 hours watching tutorials and watching all of these. I haven't spent a second actually on Ableton, whereas I should be on there for 20 hours then looking at. [01:04:51] Speaker B: Yeah. Filling the gaps with you. [01:04:54] Speaker A: I want to get my cataloging and all of that set up. Right. And because I understand a lot of what they're talking about. It's just a different door that I'm working with. The same, same comes to anything you do in life. And I was watching YouTube the other day and it was actually a sound engineer. And what he said at the end was just so true. Stop wasting time just reading books. Just do. [01:05:16] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:05:18] Speaker A: Quite often when I used to do lectures at some of the universities, they'd get me as a guest speaker. By the way, that doesn't happen anymore. Not one university will ever get me in anymore. [01:05:29] Speaker C: Why not? Why? [01:05:30] Speaker A: Because most of the star, most of the students say, how come Peter was here in an hour? We weren't. Learned more in one hour than we have in three years. Yeah. [01:05:40] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:05:41] Speaker A: How come he said, throw all these rules about rules of thirds and all of these. How many, you know, how many. What's your drop off? How many shots between highlights and who gives a shit? Does it look good? No. Change it. Use your eyes. People are going to be looking at the picture with their eyes. So that's how I am. So one. There's one I did, I think I was at Swinburne and I think it's about 200 students there. And at the end of it I said, all right, so I'll give you a choice. I've got a big commercial shoot on tomorrow. You can come. I'll pick one person. A lucky person can come and be a fly on the wall. You cannot ask me questions. You can't ask me anything. Anything. All you can do is just observe. Or you can come the day after. There'll be a model in the studio. You've got free access to all my gear, but I won't be here. And you can have the studio for the day with a hair and makeup artist and a model. Which one do you think everyone picked? [01:06:41] Speaker C: Observing. [01:06:43] Speaker A: Right. So they. They see me grab the octa and move it about, you know that much. They can't ask me why. They look at the screen and can't see the difference. They see me go back and move it a little bit further and they see me. Okay, cool. They can't see the difference, but they can't ask me, what are they learning? Nothing. If they've got a great model and all the gear in the world and waste a day, you know how much you're going to learn themselves. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're going to learn what they're doing and they're going to learn what they like, which is more important. And unfortunately, in photography, it's so much better in sound. And this is when I failed in photography university. I never wanted to do it. Parents, because I have dyslexia and I have dyslexia quite bad. And back then it was never heard of. Nobody knew what it was. And I only found out when I was 30. I actually have a condition that's not just me being a dumb. See, at. At the photography school, they would say something and because I was so embarrassed about the amount of money, my parents and I couldn't afford it. They spent $20,000 back in the 70s. Whoa. That's half a house. [01:08:07] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:08:08] Speaker A: For this course. And I'm there knowing the dad's working weekend jobs and everything. And I just. But he just didn't want me to be a bum. He didn't want me to be muso bum. And I'm there and I'm not understanding a word and I just say why? And it was just, this is how it's done. There is no why. This is. And I started saying but why? And then the whole class started saying but why? [01:08:36] Speaker B: Disruptor. [01:08:37] Speaker A: But yeah, but I was getting. I was getting pissed off because I wasn't learning and I knew how much parents had spent. So we had this massive fight. That's an hour and a half drive from South Melbourne back to Hamont back then. And finally got through to my dad's anything in music, sound engineer, anything. And he goes, I said, yeah, happy to work in studio, whatever. I just want to work in sound. So he found a college that had already been going a month without accept me in it now was a $4,000 three year diploma course. A much different. On the second or third lecturer. I've said to the lecturer, but why? And I got oh, you idiot. And he said, see the door over there? I said, yeah. He said, go in there, try it, come out and tell us why. [01:09:25] Speaker C: There you go. [01:09:28] Speaker A: No rules. Think about it carefully. So you're. You might be after a certain drum sound. Which drum sound? So that horrible thing that sounds like a bit of wood. Nine times out of 10 people say that's horrible. One band wants that sound. So you have to be able to make anything. There's no right or wrong. It might sound like a basketball being bounced, but that's the sound they want. If you think about all the music, all the different drum sounds, there is no right or wrong, is there? So your ability is to learn how to make every sound with photography. We're not doing that at school. And I see it straight away. As soon as you show someone some indie photography, they just go, that is crap. There's no skill in that whatsoever. My God, indie photography is so hard to do. I just did a commercial shoot. Even though my books are closed. I just did a commercial shoot. We spent four hours in a pub early in the morning photographing three guys in jocks. It's a new brand of underwear. It was all with on camera flash and the client wanted it overexposed. Yeah, the harsh shadow literally overexposed it. No, we're not doing overexposed. I can push it later, but once we destroy skin, we can't put it back. If I just shoot it just short of. And you still want it blown more. I can do that in post. [01:10:58] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, right. [01:11:00] Speaker A: Most people look at these photos and they look like crap. We purposely made a very vignetted with the way we use the flash. We purposely did the look we want. And when you look at it. It looks like some amateur in a pub with some piss friends. That's their clients. That's what the look they wanted. And seriously, so much harder than. If I had to light it perfectly. It would have been so easy. [01:11:27] Speaker C: Yeah. It didn't need to be a Bonsard. [01:11:31] Speaker A: No. [01:11:31] Speaker C: Yeah, they had a look. It's. It's very popular at the moment, the on camera flash. Even people even using film on camera flash. Film overexposed. Yeah. [01:11:42] Speaker B: With the Instax too. They purposely build that look into one of the. The filter settings on the Instax cameras now. [01:11:49] Speaker A: Well, Alan von Anworth I don't know if any of you are familiar with. That's her entire career and she shoots the biggest models in the world. I guarantee you've seen her pictures. She shoots Rihanna, she shoots all the biggest names in the world. She shot the last. What's the name of that singer that you didn't like anymore came out here? Young Blood. Is it Young Blood? Slightest album cover that's Alan Von Unworthy. Everything is on camera flash and she's shooting Beyonce, Rihanna. She shoots and everybody every. She had Vogue covers. You name it, she shot it. And she used to be a pin up style model when she was younger and then she took on that sort of genre herself. She's incredible photographer. I don't know how sure how old she is. You have to be in her 60s, 70s at least. And you see her out partying all the time. She's always shooting with a little point and shoot now and then. But her photos are getting covers of oak. Yeah, right. So it's you. Your style is your style. Some people will like a type of music, some people hate that type of music. Doesn't mean you're bad at it. It's just not your genre, your style. So I can't look at anybody's photography and say it's shit because I don't know what they're trying to. [01:13:12] Speaker B: That's a good point. Just before we move it, move forward a little bit with this, there's a comment here from Dennis Smith at School of Light. Let me just bring it up and. [01:13:21] Speaker A: I'll read it out. [01:13:23] Speaker B: Question. Sorry if I missed this and you touched on this at the start of the show, but maybe we can elaborate a bit more. As a relatively new photographer, I think I know why I want to lean into black and white. Can you describe what is special about. About black and white images for you? [01:13:39] Speaker A: The very first thing is, like I said, it becomes timeless. You can't. Whereas if you you can look at pictures. That's 80s, that's 90s, that's. You can see the feel. Look how much teal and orange is in shit now. Right. Look at the lighting you3 guys have got behind you right now. [01:13:55] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:13:57] Speaker A: Making sense. That is so today. And that will change in another five years. It'll have a completely different look. If you just look at cinema. You know, we had the bleach bypass look for ages then. You know, teal and orange, all these things. That's what color does in black and white. It's just. And I'm black and white. I do not have any color in my photos. I don't save them as a grayscale. They're still RGBs, but they completely only got gray every. You move your eyedropper anywhere on my picture and it'll be equal parts red, green and blue. So it is proper black and white. [01:14:39] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:14:40] Speaker A: And that's what I like the best. Black and white is so hard to do once you start doing it in color. But that's when you can actually have your style. That's why I will never ever shoot black and white film again. And I'll never ever buy a black and white digital camera. [01:14:59] Speaker C: I. I heard that on an interview you did a while ago that you. Yeah. That a monochrome camera, dedicated monochrome sensor doesn't interest you at all. [01:15:07] Speaker A: Nope. You all got the same look because. [01:15:10] Speaker C: It'S too limited in its post production for your. [01:15:14] Speaker A: Yeah. I can only change light and shadow. I can't change the tonality within the black and white. So I don't know if you heard of Vincent Peters, an amazing photographer. If you haven't anyone, look him up again. He shot Charlize Theon. She shot some of the biggest people in the world. He predominantly shoots Mamiya. I think it's an RZ with Kodak Portra 400. All his works black and white. [01:15:44] Speaker B: Really? [01:15:45] Speaker A: Yeah. I only shoot provia if I'm going to shoot film anymore. So what I do. Film doesn't work for me. I cannot get my photos with film. I am there linking with a model and we're like this and it's bang. There's a picture. I can't do that with film. My eyes aren't good enough to get that focus where I want it. I manual focus most of the time on a digital. I got focus peaking. I can just be scrolling and sitting that frigging peak on the catch light in her eye the whole time. And then, oh, there it was. There it is. So I'M chasing that. Look, if I was shooting landscape, not a problem. Shooting street, not a problem. I'd shoot film in a heartbeat. What I have done, I've spent a couple of hundred hours shooting white walls, exposing them to 18% gray, scanning the film, and then built an overlay system that I can put any film grain, any vignette off any lens and the vignette changes. So I've got film shot at f 1.2, f 2.8 div. Right. And I can drop that onto my digital picture and it works so well. I have got film friends that cannot tell the difference between something was shot on my Hasselblad H6 Digital or my MIA RB67. Sitting side by side and they cannot see it. [01:17:21] Speaker C: Wow. So just thinking tools now that people would do, they would just do it digitally, you know, like just, just add some grain, Lightroom or whatever. [01:17:30] Speaker A: It's nothing like what real grain looks like. And every film stock and if you push or pull that film stock will change the texture of the grain. So it's all. And people think I'm crazy, but sorry, no, I'm crazy. I have to pay look. And I love that film look, but I can't do it with film. It just. I'm not getting my pictures. So I can do it on my digital, but now I can make it look like film. I even did a tutorial showing how I could make my house feel like it was a big view large camera, an 8 by 10 by putting a tilt shift lens onto it and running it like ballot system and having only sharp running through the eyes a little bit. Then I've got some wet plate scans of 18% gray which I can drop one of those wet plate scans over the top. [01:18:25] Speaker C: Man, you went deep. [01:18:32] Speaker A: Yes and no. If you would. So I, I'm. I, I've always taken my pictures from start to finish. I. There's photographers like Peter Lindbergh and most of the big name fashion ones, they take the picture, they never see it till it's finished. They have nothing to do with the way it's. [01:18:50] Speaker C: Right. [01:18:50] Speaker A: I've always. Every one of my clients except for there's a couple of clients for big companies having a graphics department and they always just get the raws. But most of my clients got the finished picture and it was. It needed to look like my work. [01:19:06] Speaker C: Yep. [01:19:08] Speaker B: And I guess because you, you know, you've touched it from start to finish and you had that confidence that what the client is getting is exactly what you envisioned for them. [01:19:18] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:19:19] Speaker A: Or why or why they booked me. [01:19:22] Speaker C: Yeah. So I've been digging into your Inspire platform, which if anyone is familiar with your work but hasn't gone on there. I think it's like 30 bucks a month or something very cheap. And it's got a lot of behind the scenes from photo shoots, retouching, all sorts of stuff. Posing, models, heaps of like. It's kind of like an extension of your YouTube channel. I see. Like more in depth. [01:19:47] Speaker A: Oh yeah. YouTube's just basically the advertising for it. That's all YouTube. [01:19:51] Speaker C: Exactly. [01:19:52] Speaker A: We've done. We, we shoot stuff just for YouTube. But YouTube's a pain in the butt number. We, we used to make great money off that channel. We haven't changed. Yeah, we're pulling 8,9000amonth. [01:20:07] Speaker C: The algorithm has changed or something. It's not showing. [01:20:10] Speaker A: No, they've cut what they, they cut what they pay you. They didn't tell any of us this. Yeah, they've. They've got all their. Yeah, we're getting, we're still getting heaps of views but the revenue we make is so much less. And any reason that they can to demonetize you, they will. Yeah, but they'll still keep putting it up. Making money out of it themselves. [01:20:31] Speaker C: Oh, they'll keep showing it with ads. They just won't give you the money. Yeah, yeah. It's crazy. [01:20:36] Speaker A: So all we do is now if they demonetize it, we pull it off. [01:20:41] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [01:20:42] Speaker A: And then we'll censor it and then put it back up. Censored to try and get. [01:20:46] Speaker B: Does that happen often with your work? [01:20:48] Speaker A: It used to happen a lot. Yeah. And there's no, there's no rule. One of the best expect we always fight them when it passes. The robot now has been. We, we because of. We've got a reasonable following. We get a little bit more access than other people do. And we're talking to somebody and they said. They've said it has been demonetized because of this frame. This frame is just a girl standing there with a shirt on. It's not see through. There's nothing. They're not allowed to look at that frame. So the person you're talking to said, no, sorry, we're not that department. That department's ruled it. We can't do anything about it. But you're looking a frame which is. They're saying this is the reason we've demonetized it. Yeah, I had one the other day. I do love my music and any excuse to write and play again, I do. So I have a Series where I've got a whole heaps of bits of video of models and I write some music and then put it to it. There's one of Lottie I put up recently and it was still set on Private and it got demonetized in private. I know because that's. If that's. The robots are still going to look at it. So like, yeah, we normally have a, you know, three or four videos already sitting up there on Private that we haven't posted. So I put in review, it said, nah, we've classed this as inappropriate adult content. [01:22:20] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:22:21] Speaker A: Two days later we've reviewed your work, it's fine. And I didn't ask for a third review because it said they'll only ever do one review. So I don't know what happened. I've put it up and I've keep on waiting for it to be demonetized. It hasn't. With those ones I. I'm not as fast because that's. I got a little area called my stuff and anything that's in my stuff was never there to make money. It was there to share. So one thing people don't realize, you can put full frontal nudity on YouTube. [01:22:53] Speaker C: It's now just me. [01:22:54] Speaker A: Yeah, it's just rated R. The only people who can see it are people who are actually signed in. So if you're not signed in, you can't see it. If you're signed in, you can see it and you can view it. Yeah. [01:23:06] Speaker B: Really? [01:23:06] Speaker A: There's a whole series of Helmut Newton behind the scenes that are there. But you can only see it if you know the link where it is. It's still sitting on YouTube. Just YouTube. Make it hard to find, but you'll find yourself. If any of you on YouTube go to my normal page, you'll see now it says my stuff. There's a couple of videos there. They've got full frontal nudity on there. There's a stop frame one where I've got one naked woman killing another naked woman. [01:23:34] Speaker B: But that's okay. [01:23:36] Speaker A: That's okay. [01:23:37] Speaker C: It was. I was actually looking. I. I don't know if this counts because yeah, I was looking at your oldest videos because I always like to do that when I'm having someone on the show. I like to be. If they've got some sort of channel or I like go, go back just to see what was going on. And the rara one from like 11 years ago, which is. It's like stop motiony with the stuff going and it's. She's wearing a Top. But it's very much like sheer see through sort of stuff. And I was like, I didn't think YouTube would allow that. But. [01:24:08] Speaker A: But if you sign out, you won't be able to see that video. [01:24:12] Speaker C: Interesting. Okay. [01:24:14] Speaker A: I think it should. You should see that's rated for 18 plus adult content. [01:24:19] Speaker C: Okay. But yeah, it's very. It's very cool too. I really, I really like that. It was slightly. [01:24:25] Speaker A: Did you pick and very. Did you pick up its video cameras just sitting on tripod? It didn't move the entire shoot. [01:24:32] Speaker C: No, I didn't. [01:24:33] Speaker A: The other thing we're doing is this was shot at night time. We were using that large octa that was on a boom of. And we just swing the boom to lighter and swing it back out to unlighter. Then we'll flashing. We're flashing with triggers. That's where you'll see out of sync lines running through. That's us flying the flashes off. [01:24:55] Speaker C: Interesting. Yeah. That's not how I guessed it was produced. I thought there was a lot of still images. [01:25:04] Speaker A: No. No stills at all. In fact, this was for a commercial campaign. And what we did, we shot the video first because I can copy anything that's done in video with the still, whereas I can't copy anything shot with a still in a video. [01:25:17] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [01:25:19] Speaker A: So then any of the effects we liked, I could then reproduce those stills. We came back two days later and did the stills. [01:25:26] Speaker C: The stills. If anyone wants to see this, I can't pull it up because we aren't. I don't know, 18 plus we'll get. [01:25:34] Speaker A: No, no. If you put a link. If you put a link, you might get a strike that. [01:25:39] Speaker C: Yeah. So just, just go to. [01:25:41] Speaker A: Go to my stuff. [01:25:42] Speaker C: Peter Coulson's even. Or you just go to. If you just go to all videos and then go to oldest. It's the first rah rah one that you'll see from 11 years you have. [01:25:53] Speaker A: Or you can jump onto my website and all my videos. All of those type videos are on my website under videos and. [01:26:02] Speaker C: Yes. And so if you go to. If you go to inspire. If you do want to try it out. So someone's mentioned here. Who is it? Wookie Shane Inspires the best value online learning platform around. Yeah, it's. It's not expensive and it's. And there's a lot of content and you can just see everything and click around and follow your nose as to what you want to look into and learn about. But the best way to use it. [01:26:26] Speaker A: We tried to have it for a reason. We, the workshop things just came about. I didn't ever plan to do it. I did some stuff for Hasselblad. Next minute people and me to do workshops. They saw me on stage with them. I know they're expensive, we can't do them. Cheap models cost us a fortune. Studios cost us a fortune flying all of that. So the inspirers for the people who don't have that sort of money and we said, all right, so the people who got enough money don't want to have to worry about can just get a yearly and it's a bit cheaper. The people who not sure if they weren't just going to go on for a month and then when they don't like anymore just cancel it. We try to make cancel as easy as possible. Then people are really, really tight because we have some people that literally got three kids, a wife and only one salary. They're struggling like hell. They might save up for three or four months, go on for one month, binge like crazy. Like sign up for a month and then cancel straight away. So they still got a month. They don't have to worry about unsigning. And then I can binge like crazy, come back in six months. We haven't removed any content. We're just. We try and get something up there every seven to 14 days. Something like reasonable, not just a little five minute video, like an eight minute video. It's on YouTube. We normally aim at at least one video of 20 minutes. If not some of them go three, four, five videos which for that particular thing over a period of time. But it is meant. And not enough people use it how I want them to use it. It is meant to watch that video. Now go do it. Yeah, yeah, right. Learn, then do. That's how. And then what you'll do, you go do it and go, oh, don't like what Peter did. But when I do this, it's so much better. Bang. That's the whole idea of it. I don't want you to be a mini me. I want you to be your own photographer. [01:28:20] Speaker B: It's a starting point, isn't it? For people. [01:28:22] Speaker C: That's, that's actually why I brought this up in the first place is you had a recent video on there, a bit of a rant about style that I wanted to, I really enjoyed and I wanted to revisit it on the podcast for people that haven't seen that video. And there's also, I think there's also a version of that video on YouTube as well. So you can. [01:28:41] Speaker A: Yeah, I had to. I had to sense it because YouTube didn't like it. I don't like censoring, but if you. I still thought the message was strong enough to put on YouTube to. And censored. So. [01:28:54] Speaker C: Yeah, can you tell us a little? Revisit that a little bit? Your thoughts on developing your own style and. [01:29:03] Speaker A: And what? [01:29:04] Speaker C: Yeah, tell us. [01:29:06] Speaker A: So one of the easiest way for me to put it is I guarantee all of you can cook, can't you? Even if it's just eggs on toast. [01:29:14] Speaker C: Steak, good steak. [01:29:15] Speaker A: Yeah. So if I went around to your place to have a steak with you, you don't know how I like my steak. You don't know how much salt I want or how much pepper if I want. You don't know anything how I like it. So how can you cook for me? You know exactly what you like. So if you're making a sauce to go with it, you're going to be tasting it. Hopefully not putting your finger back in there, but you're tasting away. You know that's seasoned just to my taste. Right. You can't season it to my taste. You can only season it to your taste. Is this starting to make sense? [01:29:52] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:29:54] Speaker A: So now we take this to photography. How can you take a pit. How can I take a picture for you? Or you? Or you? I can't take a picture for any of you. I can only take a picture for me. It's got to be what I like. If I'm an artist, I'm going to paint. Every brushstroke is going to be my decision that I want to put that line there. And the more that you can get your photography to actually be you and forget the rules. Like, Beck put up a picture on Instagram last night as a stir picture, but it's a picture of Beck naked on a beach with a YSL bag on her. And we talk about this on workshops and I think it's also in this thing that when you bring it up, everyone's going to say every technical photographer is going to go, oh, look at the horizon's crooked. I'm not photographing the horizon. I'm photographing Beck. [01:30:56] Speaker C: Yeah, you know, it's funny, I saw that picture, I didn't even notice. [01:31:00] Speaker A: I didn't know that. Thank you. [01:31:01] Speaker C: I didn't notice at all. [01:31:03] Speaker A: Good. Because you've just told me you're actually a true photographer. You're not a camera club style photographer. You're not trying to analyze you, just the photo. If you look carefully, Beck's bum and Beck's feet are parallel with the bottom. The YSL bag is parallel with the bottom. Her eyes are parallel with the bottom. So she is perfect square. I'm not taking a picture of the ocean. I'm taking a picture of her in the workshop. I think even in the tutorial, I've tilted it to straighten up the horizon. And what happens? You fall off. Beck, look carefully. See how the horizon draws you into her eyes. You're falling into her. As soon as you level that horizon, you literally fall off her. And there's another picture I've got, which is a test. An Italian model laying on a bed. And number one, I didn't even notice. I don't think it's on. Quick and easy on here. It's definitely on my website. If with tests on the bed, the bed has got a slight lean. And I never noticed there's an IKEA label inside the pillow case. Right. So I photographed it, I selected the picture, I retouched it, and I posted. Never saw the IKEA label. So did it bother me? No. So because it didn't bother me, why would I take it out? With my skills in Photoshop, I could pull that in a second. But it did not bother me. That was the pillow she was sleeping on. If I'd seen it, I could have easily flipped the pillow. So that's the first thing people say. The next thing is the tilt. As soon as you make it level, the picture just loses its soul completely. It looks boring. My most favorite picture for this, and I knew the second I took was an LA model in the studio. She was on the wall behind me. We're trying to do something a little bit like a. There's an Irving Pen style of shot it has been up on. Have we put on Insta recently? The foot? Yeah. Maybe if you look down, you'll see a naked girl on the side with sticking out of her bum. So when I was taking the pictures, I've taken that frame I've got, oh, my God, I'm gonna get crucified tonight. And she's laughing and saying, why? Why? I said, I love this picture so much, but I am going to get crucified. So I put the picture up and first comment, the foot. Second comment, what about the foot? Third comment, the dirty foot. Oh, the foot. Every comment was coming up the foot. Then some lovely person on Facebook decided to copy the picture, edit the foot off, and free post it for me. It didn't bother me. Everyone's attacking him. I told him, leave him alone. Doesn't bother me. I actually love what he just did because everyone just all of a sudden said, oh, picture just looks boring now. It needed that foot. That foot was the thing that made the picture unique. And it speaks of my messed up sense of humor. And again, I'm shooting more for fashion. I'm not trying to take pictures to turn men on. I'm trying to take pictures that women want to look at. Right. So with Boudoiranas, everything has to be perfect. The skin's got to be perfect. It'll look like this plastic doll on a bed. Whereas I'm much more into fashion. If you look at the high end fashion, I'm not talking Vogue's actually quite low in fashion. Some of the high end magazines like Numero id, vw magazines like that, that's when you see the real work in fashion. And if I mention some of the top fashion photographers, 90% of the people never heard of them. Funny how few photographers even know about, you know, people like show studios. Nick Knight, right? Nick Knight had a pro under calendar. You don't get a pro on the calendar unless you are the top in the world that year. He is an incredible. He's done so many music videos, all right. He warps and photoshop destroys things like crazy. He's the most amazing artist. He's shot every major campaign and model in the world. And for a long time, I don't know if he's still got it. His studio has a live camera feed out of his main studio. [01:35:35] Speaker B: What, just a webcam running all the time? [01:35:39] Speaker A: Yeah, I. I watched a couple as one cover of magazine was being shot. It was Cara Delevina. There's three amazing big models in there. And they're all in there. I'm watching this live. And they had multi cameras on. You could actually click which camera you wanted to see right through to the monitor. [01:35:56] Speaker C: That's cool. [01:35:57] Speaker A: And the picture thing was really cool. So Cara Delevina was in this like sheer type of top, this little undies. And she was doing a pose where she was putting her little pinkies into her underwear like that, then pulling them outside on. So she's doing this and doing this and all of a sudden, snap, the undies came off. Off. She turned around to the camera, did a peace sign over her bit and one in there or somewhere like this. They ended up the COVID of the magazine. [01:36:25] Speaker C: Really? [01:36:26] Speaker A: And you got to see it happen live. [01:36:29] Speaker C: Yep. Wow. [01:36:30] Speaker A: So these are these things that I love art. I love crazy talented photographers. Even if it's not that my style, just watching them create, watching them use their mind. The minds like David LaChapelle's early stuff was just to die for. How he got those people to do what they did. Super famous people to be so crazy out there on a photo shoot. Yeah, that's my passion. But a lot of that talk was about understanding your photos. The more you can make your photos, you, the more you are going to have a style, the more you don't look at it and go, oh, I need to fix this. Yeah. Why did you click it? You obviously liked it when you clicked it. There's certain things I will fix. Oh, I didn't see that, but I see them not long after I've taken the shot. But the amount of times people are going through analyzing their picture and applying everybody else's rule to your picture, this AI is really bad for those people. And the one thing I don't get, I'm seeing more and more photographers posting AI pictures. [01:37:56] Speaker C: When you say generated by AI or they're starting to mimic AI style because that. [01:38:02] Speaker A: Generated by AI. [01:38:06] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:38:06] Speaker A: Right. So we've, we've got a Facebook group and we ban AI pictures. And the amount of photographers we've had to remove off because they keep putting AI pictures up, that's the only way they can take a decent picture is create it with AI. [01:38:20] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:38:21] Speaker A: Beck and I had fun the other day. I think it's on YouTube. Pretty sure it's on YouTube or part of it. The big part. On Inspire, we found some AI pictures and I copied the lighting. [01:38:31] Speaker C: I was watching that. It is on YouTube. Yeah. [01:38:34] Speaker A: It's so much fun to do because I looked at lighting a bit differently. Oh, I had some hotspots. I love hotspots. Let's mimic and try and copy the AI. I just didn't then do the photo retouching to make a make back plastic. I wanted to keep the soul of the picture, just steal the essence of what the AI picture had done and now make it real. And I've made a concerted effort in the last or since just before Christmas. I really made a concerted effort into looking at my retouching and I've dialed my retouching back by 50%, literally. [01:39:12] Speaker C: Interesting. [01:39:12] Speaker A: I've got a now new area that. All right, I ignore those, I ignore this, I ignore this. Yeah, I'm going to fix these. [01:39:20] Speaker C: Yep. [01:39:21] Speaker A: So we've had retouching's been done since start of film. All these people say, oh, it's not traditional. Sorry. The amount of retouching Was done in film. I know one of my relations was a film retoucher. Yeah, she used to color film and she used to remove blemishes and do all of that stuff. [01:39:39] Speaker C: So this is gonna sound dumb because I just, I shoot a little bit of film now, but I wasn't around in the. In the professional days of film photography. How does film retouching work? Like how do they remove blemishes in heard of airbrushing. So it is just that literally that it's painting. [01:39:58] Speaker A: It's some. Some work can be done on negatives. Very little. Most of the work's done on the finished print. [01:40:06] Speaker C: Okay. [01:40:08] Speaker A: So magazines used to have to do it all the time and they can do head swaps and everything. You'd be surprised what they could do. They used to be able to put in product into the photo. [01:40:19] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:40:20] Speaker B: Just paint it in. [01:40:23] Speaker A: Or do it this special masking with negatives. Yeah, lots and lots of tricks. There's very high end. That's a look at the dodging, burning. There's. If you do a search on the James Dean, famous James Dean picture in New York, look, it's got the Dodge and burn chart for it. And you're just going to go, no way. Someone has to sit there and do this much in here, then this much here. That all the. Yeah, the skill of those people is incredible. But that picture didn't work the way mother nature gave it to the photographer. He needed to lighten areas and darken areas to make that picture work better. [01:41:04] Speaker C: And it's just, we're just on an evolution from something that was quite difficult to achieve a real art form and technical problem, to then, you know, early days of Photoshop, still quite technical and things, but a little bit easier to access for people. And then it got easier and easier and now the tools are more and more automated. And then now there's the fully automated versions. Like, I've been playing around with that AI software that got in a lot of trouble recently for the headshot thing. I don't know if you heard about that. Yes. But I've been playing around with that and yeah, kind of does. I mean it. I'm sure you would probably look at it and go, it's. It's very surface level automated, but it kind of does what it says on the tin. You put a photo in it and you can use a slider to remove blemishes or, or whatever. And you're like, I'll just do 70 blemishes. You know, like it's have you have. [01:42:06] Speaker A: You actually zoomed in at 100 past 100, have a look at what has done to skin? [01:42:12] Speaker C: No, because I don't do I. I was just, I actually played around with it for our podcast, Thumbnail Headshots. But, but I wouldn't, I don't think I would use it for. Well, I don't do like high end people photography and studio and stuff like that. So I haven't tested it on. Yeah. On anything that, that I would be worried about whether it's because I'm assuming it's changing. I mean, but also Lightroom is doing that too. If you use the AI, you know, removal tools and stuff. Now it's just doing it at a one instance at a time as opposed to grab someone's whole face and detect blemishes. [01:42:52] Speaker A: What's really interesting. And people might say I've got too much time. I'm not a technical person but I seem to know friggin heaps. But one of the biggest things I learned was you get a film grain picture, you take it into Photoshop and then you make a zigzag curve or a solar curve. If you don't know what it is, just type it, you'll find it on the Internet. It's a zigzag curve and when you turn that on, it brings up every blemish, every dust spot. It shows you all your problems. So it's like a referencing. So you bring that up on your film and you can grab a heal tool, you could grab your clone stamp tool, any tool you like and you use it on your bit of film and you're going to go, oh, what did that just do? The solar curve is going to show you the damage that you don't really see until it's blown up to 2, 3 meters. There's a video we did many years ago with Rara naked in lingerie in the streets of Melbourne at night. And there's a. I think right near the start you'll see me with somebody. And there's a big window. I think it was Dior window. And we're pointing, looking at a picture. That guy was Damon Rulak who was head of Hasselblad in Australia. And I was pointing out every heel tool mark on the picture and Damon's going, surely they would have seen that. I said, not 90% of photographers have got no idea what a heel tool mark looks like. What does the heel tool do? Grabs the texture, not the color. And you place that texture and then it feathers it out to match back into the other. You've created an out of focus donut. [01:44:35] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [01:44:36] Speaker A: And once you can see what they look like, you can see them everywhere. So heal tools are great in out of focus areas. They are terrible in focus areas. Another thing a lot of photographers do, they hung up on the sharp crap. Sharp has been brought in by camera manufacturers, nobody else. The greatest photographers in the world's pictures aren't sharp. Most of the photographers I know don't care about sharp. I never sharpen my raw. Ever. Never ever? No. Why would you sharpen no on the raw? [01:45:17] Speaker C: Oh, sorry, I see what you're saying. So you would sharpen specifically for the output. So say if it was getting printed at a certain size. Size or, or being used. [01:45:25] Speaker A: Yeah. My, my finished pitch is a layered tiff, non cropped and non sharpened. I never crop my main picture and I never sharpen it. Then I have a client that wants it 2 meters high by this it's going to be printed on matte paper. I will either leave that to my printer to know how much sharpening to put on that's going to be lost in the printing process. If I'm going to put it on the web, I'm going to use my little sharpening formula which is a 0.4 sharpen for web. I even did it on my own pictures because the web seems to just take the edge off. All it does is put it there so it can be taken back off and it looks the same. I can look at a picture on my screen and look at the same picture on the Internet and they look the same. I don't want it sharper than. I don't use sharpen for sharpening a picture sharper than what, how it was taken. Now as soon as you start to do sharpening, you're now going to. Especially if you sharpen your raw. When you start to use healing and things like that, you're going to make the doughnuts even worse. [01:46:28] Speaker C: Yeah. Because you're going to have sharp accentuating it. [01:46:30] Speaker A: It's accentuating it. And the other thing is too many photographers don't print their work. [01:46:37] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:46:38] Speaker A: Even you guys. When was the last time you printed something? [01:46:41] Speaker C: I bought a nice little. I bought a nice Little Canon Pro 1100 last year specifically for that reason. Because I used to, Jim and I used to share a printer, an A2 like an Epson 3880 when we were working in the same office. And so we, we had this thing sitting there, we're printing it for clients so you could, you know, you could semi regularly print your own work. And then once I detached myself from that and it wasn't in my office anymore, I just didn't. You just don't get around to it. And so now I need to have it sitting in the office because I just, I think I'm. I don't get. I don't get the bug to like send it off to a printer. I need to do it when I want to do it. [01:47:18] Speaker A: I want not to fully understand the product. Fully understand that, but I do. Yeah. I've got printings in my studio as well. So I've got a commercial printer. I can just. He has my hard drive. [01:47:31] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:47:31] Speaker A: So I update the hard drive with him. I can just send him an email. Print this at this size. [01:47:35] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:47:36] Speaker A: And I can just. And I can just say, you pick. Well, we travel a lot. We are up to six months a year overseas. So if something a lot of people don't realize that I. Everyone thinks of, how does he make you money? You're just thinking about people paying me to take a photo. You're not thinking of people who see one of my photos and want to buy the usage of that photo or want to print that photo for himself. That's where half of my money comes from. 30 years worth of photos. You build up a pretty big library of stuff that people want. Yeah. I try and say to people, you should just. I'll just quickly finish. I try and say to people, you should go once a month, go through everything you shot and retouched and pick the picture you're going to print, then print it and then enjoy looking it on paper. [01:48:29] Speaker C: Yep. [01:48:31] Speaker A: My sim room is. It's wallpapered in. Like I literally use blue glue and stick the pictures on. I hope I never have to sell a house. We'll have to replaster the place to. But literally the pictures are just stuck on. And I get. Whenever I'm feeling a bit flat and down, I just walk in there and start looking around the walls and all of a sudden you just, oh my God, I remember that. I remember that. Oh my God, I can't believe I took that. Yeah, it just brings, that brings the joy of your photos back to yourself. It's like you're cooking a steak. Your first mouthful, you go, yeah, this is why I don't eat out. Huh? [01:49:08] Speaker C: It's, it's, it's actually getting, it's getting a bit because I haven't had a good steak out for a long time now and then whenever I do risk it and it's not that great. You're like, ah. [01:49:21] Speaker A: Beck literally hates me because before she started working with me, she could eat anywhere, enjoy the meals. She can't because I. I cook steaks, I do pizzas, I do smash burgers better than anybody. Can I. Because I'm so fussy about anything I do now every time we're traveling. In fact, last time I went to Europe, we started cooking in Airbnbs, Cooking at home because the food was better than we could buy. Yeah, yeah. [01:49:50] Speaker C: Watch. Watch Jim's face when I ask you this question. How many barbecues have you got? [01:49:56] Speaker A: I've got three. Oh, no, four. [01:50:00] Speaker C: What. What are they? I've got. I've got five. And you've sold about five. Yeah, I've sold five and I've currently got one. [01:50:12] Speaker A: If it, if it wasn't me trying to stop gear acquisition syndrome happening with my barbecues, I would have a. Most likely seven. I would have definitely had nothing. I would have an Argentinian grill, which I don't have. I really would love. But I'm only going to use it two or three times a year. But I've got a proper Blackstone barbecue for doing stuff like burgers and that stuff on. I've got my Primo, which is like the green egg, but I got the big oval one of those. I was going to get myself an offset smoker. But why the Primo does such a good job of it. [01:50:49] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:50:49] Speaker A: And I can do a 10 to 12 hour brisket and really hardly have to touch the anything. It'll just hold that temperature. [01:50:57] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:50:57] Speaker A: Every now and then might have to open the door that a little bit. So. And then I've got my little Japanese hot coals barbecue which I normally cook. That's it. Normally only pulled out once a year for Christmas. I cook everyone's meal on that at Christmas time. [01:51:13] Speaker C: That's cool. [01:51:14] Speaker B: Yeah, I've been looking at those too. [01:51:15] Speaker C: Yeah, they're little. Yeah. [01:51:19] Speaker A: Good barbecue. It'll. You've got about four hours of stinking hot coals. So our Christmas Day is just. We'll do some steaks on there now. Do a bit of chicken, lose some prawns. We just keep coming back to it. [01:51:33] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. So I'm. [01:51:36] Speaker A: I'm. [01:51:36] Speaker C: I've bought and sold a lot, but I'm currently running. I've got a wood offset that I don't use very often because you've got to nurse it all day. Yeah, yeah. It's like. It is a lot of work. They don't hold their temp Anywhere near as well as your. Your egg thing, your Primo. But I've got so in as well as that. I bought a Weber's newest pallet smoker, which is actually surprisingly good considering it's a pallet smoker. It does a good job and it's fully automated. I can throw it on and work all day and just check the meat every now and then. And then Weber's version of the Blackstone thing, the griddle, which is what I. I cook all my steaks and everything on that now. [01:52:14] Speaker A: My steaks. Most people, we. We've got a five day workshop coming up. Everyone who comes gets my steak on the fifth day and they are horrified when they see me make it. So if I. No, if I'm in, if I'm at home, we've got plenty of time and I can, we can have the steak whenever I want. They'll go into the Primo under smoke at a low temperature, get them up to an internal temperature of 49 degrees, pulled off. And then I have a flame thrower. No, not a petrol one. I have a. It's like what they use on the roads to melt the bitumen. It's just right. So it's 10 seconds aside. [01:53:00] Speaker C: Really. [01:53:01] Speaker A: Yeah, that's it. That's it. So you're cooking. The meat is perfectly cooked throughout with a bit of a nice smoky taste. And literally 10 seconds of that, you've charcoaled the outside. But it you. When I'm. When I'm not restricted for time, whereas I can decide anytime within an hour to want to have the steak within five minutes. I got a sous vide. So I'll sous vide them. [01:53:31] Speaker C: Oh, yeah. [01:53:32] Speaker A: Right. So they'll be again brought up to just this exact temperature and then when they're ready, just pat dry them on their same thing. The amount of everybody here at the blame for them. Yep. [01:53:45] Speaker C: Wow. We're going to first suv. Do you prefer SUV or Primo, if you like. If you could pick one or the other fear stakes for the way you like. Like to eat them. [01:53:53] Speaker A: The pro. Just that slight smokiness that comes in just. [01:53:59] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:53:59] Speaker A: This is supposed to be a photography channel. It always happens. I saved it. [01:54:02] Speaker C: I saved it till the end. I saved it. I didn't derail the interview, but I. [01:54:08] Speaker A: Was like, sorry, I did forget one other barbecue. I still. I've also got a pizza oven. Like a wood fire gas pizza oven. I love. I got the gonzo gosney, the large gosney. [01:54:23] Speaker C: Nice. [01:54:23] Speaker A: So the good thing with that with gas, you can Just do it whenever you like. If you want to get the temperature up with gas, then you can just throw a little bit of logs in the back corner and get your smoke into it. So it's a cheat way of doing it. But my pizza takes about 1 minute 20. That's it cooked? [01:54:39] Speaker C: Yes. I got mini ones for my 40th. Yeah, the little portable gosn one. Like the. The. Yeah, but it's. It does great. Like it's. [01:54:50] Speaker A: No, that's fine. I. I did have one then. My. My daughter has it. So whenever I go to the daughter's place, I have to cook pizzas for them. [01:54:56] Speaker C: So. [01:54:56] Speaker A: See, I spend four days. It takes me four days to make my dough. My tomato sauce takes about four to five hours. [01:55:04] Speaker C: Okay. That's commitment. [01:55:05] Speaker A: You know, I do. I've got a proper dough mixer and I used to do it by hand, but now I use the mixer because it does it better. But yeah, it's a whole thing of. I decide if I can do polish first or bigger. If you haven't done it, they're a fermenting thing. So that goes back into the fridge for one to two days and comes out. Goes through the mixer, back in the fridge for another day, comes out, then gets divided up, shaped up. Then it's usable for the next two days, but it goes back in the fridge. Yeah, I'm hungry now. [01:55:33] Speaker C: Yeah, me too. This is if you. I did actually. I was looking at that one workshop that you've got coming up. If. If. Yeah, if someone happens to get violent food poisoning beforehand and you need someone to step in, I am ready. I'm ready to go. I saw that workshop. I was like, damn it. I didn't. I had no idea that that was coming up. It sounds epic. [01:55:54] Speaker A: It sells out every year. It does. It's because it's in my studio. It's five days. It's a small group, 10 people. They all get to know each other. There's a lot of, like, everything's easy and flows. It's just so much. Everyone becomes friends to know each other. And we're working with my models. We get a couple of models I don't have. Never worked with before. So people can see how I deal with that. But it's just. We've tried to run it in other places. We. We used to be able to run it in Brisbane. There's a guy up there who had a massive studio and I had the same ability to run lots of shooting areas at the same time. We tried to run it in London. It just gets too hard. The lot of studios are very boring after two days where I've got all my movable walls and all of that type of stuff so we can keep it fresh. [01:56:47] Speaker B: A bit of a playground, it sounds like. [01:56:49] Speaker A: But yeah, unfortunately it does sell out every year and it sells out, sells out quicker than Tomorrowland. [01:56:55] Speaker C: I'll, I'll email Beck about getting Gemini on The list for 2027. The waiting list. Yeah, we, we saw it. We're like, oh, we 100% would have both gone. That would have been great. [01:57:08] Speaker A: If I decided not to do America this year, we might run another one towards the end of the year. [01:57:13] Speaker B: I wanted to ask you about your workshops, especially your international ones. Do you notice a difference between how photographers approach their craft based on location? You know, you go to London, you go to Berlin and Amsterdam and, and obviously you do a lot of work here in Australia. Do you notice any fundamental differences between, between photographers as they approach the same craft? [01:57:37] Speaker A: There's a percentage of places where you do see the creativity of the photographers a lot more and then there's other places a little bit like America tend to get very much more. The camera clubby thinking, very set with their rules and you know, three point lighting and all of that. The whole idea is the workshop is not to, not to me to change who you are as a photographer in the way of you can be high saturated color, you can be whatever you like. That's not what the workshop's about. We spend the first, on the first day, we spend an hour and I call it breaking the photographer, showing you all the rules and showing you I broke them and the picture's still fine. [01:58:19] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:58:21] Speaker A: So trying to get the photo back to like what that rant I had, trying to get the photographer back to realize that you really taking photos for yourself, not anybody else and take what you love. Don't listen to other people saying, oh, where's the catch light in the eye? Oh, I don't like that shadow. Oh, if you don't, if you like it, that's how it should be. That's your style. So we do that for the first hour just to get them in. I didn't show them lots of famous, famous pictures that broken all the rules, then I'd show them the most famous picture in the world. Most famous photo in the world. I'm not going to name what it is because you already know what it is. And I say amazing light, isn't it? And so look at the incredible retouching. Look at the, the camera. He Must have used. And the lens he must have used just through the roof. None of them. And it's the most famous picture in the world. Do you know what picture I'm talking about? [01:59:22] Speaker C: I'm worried. [01:59:23] Speaker A: Portrait. Most famous. Yes. [01:59:27] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:59:28] Speaker A: Now look at that. [01:59:29] Speaker C: The afghan girl. [01:59:30] Speaker A: Steve McCurdy's. Have a look at that, Makari. Sorry. Have a look at that picture. Yeah, sorry, Dyslexia. Have a look at that picture. And you look at the lighting, you look at the retouching, you look at what camera it would have been and you're just going to say, it could have been any camera. The lighting's just what it is. There's no retouching. So get back to taking that photo. That's the photo. It's a subject. And photography should. When you. When I'm not talking landscape, I'm not talking about still life, I'm not talking about street, I'm talking about what I do, fashion, portraiture and art. And I try. So then I start off the first. The first day is the most important to me. The people who don't do the first day in studio and just want to do the advance, to me, they're dumb because the learning's the first day. The second day is just showing an extension of it. Most people don't understand how light works. And it's amazing. When I show one bit of lighting and as soon as I take my first picture, I just look at everyone who expected that picture and point at the picture, I'm just going to go, nah, never thought you'd get that picture from that light. And I say, that's why you're here. See, you don't understand how light works. And I try and dumb it down as much as possible, make as simple as possible so everybody can understand. And it's amazing. By the end of the first day, they just go. All this lighting was so simple, but I learned so much. I don't need 40 lights, I don't need to have all these different diffusers. I can. If I learn to use this one light properly, I can do anything. [02:01:12] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:01:13] Speaker A: And it's more. Sorry, no, you are just. [02:01:18] Speaker B: I was just going to say what, what is the. What is kind of like the. The skill level and the temperament of the people that are coming to your workshops in general. [02:01:28] Speaker A: Right through we asked if you can't shoot in manual, learn how to be manual and come back next year. So all I'm saying is we want you to at least know, you know, get off aperture priority shutter or any of those Things your camera takes control of. Just so you know, I never use any of those and have never used any of those in my commercial work ever. And I'm talking about nighttime shooting, fashion shows, catwalk shows, every. I've never ever used a priority. It's always been manual. Once you learn that, you'll never go back because the camera never gets it right. If you go into aperture priority and go shoot an event, you'll get into lightroom and bring this picture up, this picture down, this picture up, this. Right. You go to my event. Every picture is exactly the same. So that we're teaching more to get. So people come in that level. We have pros come in. Guys have been running studios for 10 years not happy with their lighting. Yeah, they're feeling the aligning and soulless. It's three. It's like what you learn at university. And it's a little bit like what I started with. I have a storyboard which I keep adding to every time I see a nice picture saved dump. And I think there's about 5,000 pictures in there now. In my early days, I'd every now and then throw one of my latest bits of work into that storyboard. And I would always stand out, which meant I wasn't there yet. My work wasn't good enough to sit next to the work I loved. And what that taught me to. There's three levels of polishing, and most photographers don't do any of those levels of polishing. And that's the difference between Peter Lindbergh, Patrick de Michelle, all those greats, Their picture is polished from the start, whereas most of the photographers aren't doing that. They set up the lighting. Oh, that's nice. Click, click, click, click. That's it. Never would I work that way. That light's going to morph the entire shoot. Only be slightly changing it right through the shoot, just slightly. But I'm going to take 10, 20, 30 minutes to get it polished. So it's the amount of times that even on a workshop, I'll do a setup and then one goes, oh, that's nice. I said, yeah, nah, you watch 20 minutes, you won't even like that lighting anymore. But see, all of them would have stopped at that point. No, there's my starting point. There's my starting point. I need to polish that. So once I finish polishing my light, the model comes in. I polish the model, put on the right music, get her into the right mood, talk to her. The way to get the type of picture we would get out, work on that to get that. And I'm working on one frame. Most of my shoots is for one frame. An album cover, the COVID of magazine. You get paid the most for those three pictures inside a magazine. Now it's not even worth it. I want the COVID right? So I don't mind shooting two, three hours to get that killer shot. Why would I show anyone the second best shot? Right? So that's how my mind thinks. So once I've got my shot and I've decided this is my killer shot, then it goes into Photoshop and not over Photoshopped. When you learn, you tend to go into Lightroom Photoshop and go, oh, I wonder what that does. I wonder what that does. I wonder what that does. You slide things around, you play with other people's actions. You do all of that stuff. Not with me. I can tell you what I'm going to do before I've even started. I'm going to say I want it more contrasty, but I want to see more detail in the shadows. So I'm going to bring my shadows up more. They're going to throw some contrast on there. I am going to try and get a halo over this area. I'm going to vignette off that. I know exactly what I'm going to do to the picture before I start touching it. So it's not like, let's see what happens. It's, I know what I'm doing and that's that polishing. Because then it's your style. You already know. I do get annoyed with people who buy action sets because all you're doing is putting somebody else's. Like Peter McKinnon's look on your photo. That's not your photo anymore. Shaun Archer look on your photo. That's a Sean. The amount of people I've seen use Shaun Archer stuff and put it up and goes, oh, it's a Sean Archer picture. No, it's his look on. [02:06:00] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:06:01] Speaker A: If you want to learn your stuff, you might grab some actions and play them now. Manipulate that action to your look and then save it now as a your look. Well, I don't even like actions in that way. I don't have an action for a look. I have an action from a Photoshop and it's a healing layer. It's the solarized curve is a dodge and burn layout, which is just a curve, a very small curve and that layers are blacked out. So you mask. I'm painting on the mask with a white brush at 1% flow. 1%. I never take it off 1%. So every brush stroke is only 1%. Above that I have a cutting layer, which is more like traditional dodge and burning. Above that I have a gradient map layer, which is a way of adding contrast linear through the picture. And then I have a curve layer sitting above that, which has got nothing on it. It's at the end I might put a curve and then paint the curve partly out of the picture again. That's it. That's my action. If you turn my action on and off, the picture does not change until I start working on my layers. So all it's done is put all my layers I want to work with. I might add layers later on, but they're just all the layers I normally want to work with and then just start working. After my little bit of meltdown before Christmas, I've got an average, what I'd call high end retouch, something I'm happy to print. 2 meters high is now down to about 5 to 7 minutes. I'm fully happy with it and I've shown a couple of people. Here is a 20 minute retouch and this is my new retouch. Touching. And they'll go, it's more soul on this one. [02:07:48] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:07:48] Speaker A: And that's the one with the less retouching. And it's separating me, separating me away from AI because you, I guarantee you, all of you, already seeing. You're starting to see AI. [02:08:02] Speaker C: Absolutely. [02:08:03] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, yeah. [02:08:04] Speaker B: Right. [02:08:04] Speaker A: So do you want your pictures to feel like, oh, is that I or not? So it doesn't feel real. I was watching a great movie the other day. It was completely wrecked by cgi. Like Frankenstein. Loved the new Frankenstein. They didn't even need to show the scene of the wolves attacking the sheep. It looks so fake. [02:08:25] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:08:26] Speaker A: They could have just had a scene showing all the dead sheep. It would have been better than what they did. And unfortunately, this is what AI is doing. The only thing I like about AI, I love all these people putting bikinis on Elbow. I'm loving the funny stuff. I'm loving, like anything that happens. It's like a. The Billy Eilish signal. Some massive ones came out from there. I'm just loving the comedy that people are doing with it. [02:08:54] Speaker C: Yeah, People able to express their humor through it quickly without having to have Photoshop skills or whatever to make their humor. They can just do it straight away. Yeah. [02:09:04] Speaker A: Beck uses a bit on our podcast. Because our podcast is just a podcast. It's only a thumbnail. And, you know, we've had a couple where you know we wanted Beck to be a DJ and me to even the people in the crowd. And she just grabbed two pictures into Banana Bang. Oh, my God, it looks so real, so bananas. Yeah, for that side. But everyone can see it's fake. You can see it. It's. We're not trying to take anyone's job. It's just trying to put a joke out there. But when I. Again, in the workshops, I do show an AI picture and most people say, yeah, I really like this one. What's wrong? There's something not right. And say, yeah, it's AI. [02:09:45] Speaker B: We brought it up. We brought it up a couple of times on the show, talking about the Coca Cola ad, the Christmas ad, and just how many mistakes people have been able to point out in that ad. Because it feels to me like visual creatives think that it's like a false economy. It's like a false confidence almost that it's going to fix it. It's gonna. It's gonna do what I need it to do. But they don't. They don't pass a critical. They don't seem to pass that critical eye over it. You know, Coca Cola probably has one of the biggest budgets for marketing in the world. [02:10:16] Speaker A: Yeah. How did it get passed? [02:10:18] Speaker B: And there was. [02:10:18] Speaker C: Do you reckon it was strategy, though? Because it possible there's mistakes. They wanted people. Exactly. They wanted people to comment on the mistakes or something like that. I'd love to know. I'd love to know if it's operating. [02:10:29] Speaker A: At that level or if it was just knowing. Knowing big business. Not a hope in hell. No. But loving the fact that it's there now people are talking about it. No, seriously, if you've ever worked with very big businesses, and I've had some massive campaigns with very, very large businesses, the people, the art directors, all the people in the meeting that they're so up their own ass they don't know what's going on. They seriously do not. The amount of times I had an art director sacked, I didn't go purposely to do this, but halfway through a shoot, Johnson and Johnson sacked the art director because we're just wasting time on something that obviously was crap. And I just. I was getting frustrated on the shoot. We're just shooting the same picture 500 times. The art director went to the toilet. Someone in one of the extras in the bus said, you look really frustrated. This is just dumb. This is money being wasted and this is dumb. So the bus full of people in the studio, it was all set up, and she said, why is it dumb. I said, you've got a mother in a Hascam suit, and you got a child not in a Hascam suit. This is. [02:11:41] Speaker B: This. [02:11:42] Speaker A: This is before COVID This is a new product which protects you as a barrier from disease. I don't know a mother who would get in there and leave the child out. [02:11:52] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:11:54] Speaker A: Most mothers would put the child in the oversized heads and they would stand outside. Yeah. The person I was talking to in the bus, I didn't realize was the head of marketing of Johnson Johnson. There were two people short extra. And she went and sat in there. She then got off that seat, went and spoke to the ad agency. The schools come out of the tight. She's told to go home. I finished the rest of the shoot on my own. And they changed it. They quickly got a has cam suit for the. The child and everything. Like 15 minutes later, we got the shot. [02:12:25] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:12:25] Speaker A: And that the. I just know how big business is. And it's not like I'm great. It's just they're so far up themselves because they come up with this silly idea in the first place. [02:12:36] Speaker C: And. And then it's great to follow it through to justify that their role was really important in this process kind of thing. Yeah. [02:12:43] Speaker B: And it's that whole, you know, creating something special through a committee, it just doesn't. It doesn't equate. [02:12:47] Speaker A: Doesn't work. [02:12:48] Speaker B: No, because like you said earlier about taste and about how you like a steak versus how Justin likes a steak, everyone's got it. And when you try to try to add everyone's flavor to an idea meal, it's a pub. [02:13:00] Speaker A: Imagine, imagine we had yesterday. [02:13:02] Speaker B: Just average. [02:13:04] Speaker A: Imagine cooking to a room full of highest end chefs. Right. And you could be an amazing chef, but you know that every one of them has different tastes. So you just still cook for yourself. It's the only way you can do it. Yeah. [02:13:20] Speaker B: Now I'm hungry again. We need to get off the topic of food. [02:13:23] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:13:25] Speaker B: Peter, can we talk a little bit about gear? [02:13:27] Speaker C: Yeah, if you've got time too. It is, it is. We've been. No, no, it's quarter past 11. As long as you're okay, yell out. [02:13:35] Speaker A: No, I don't. I don't have to do any work while I'm doing this. Beck keeps. [02:13:41] Speaker C: We'll keep you on here all day. [02:13:42] Speaker A: Yeah, we'll just keep going. [02:13:47] Speaker B: It is the devil, but sometimes the devil's in the detail. I watched this morning, actually, I watched yours and Beck's video on what you packed when you went to Europe. The amount of gear you carry and your unique solution for moving four cases or four suitcases along at the same time. A lot of that gear was video gear. And I just wanted to ask you with the video content that you're capturing, is that for the client as well or is that purely for your behind the scenes work? Your inspire site. [02:14:18] Speaker A: All of the. [02:14:19] Speaker B: Obviously it is all of the above. [02:14:21] Speaker A: Yep. All of the above. If one of my favorite teaching videos that I have for teaching models. I use a bit to teach photographers. If I didn't have that gear I would never have been able to shoot that video. That was in London in Airbnb. [02:14:35] Speaker C: Yep. [02:14:36] Speaker A: And if. If I didn't have it, I just would never have got it. And that's been such important part I have with my video gear for our next trips. It'll be less with the new iPhone and using Blackmagic app even I'm doing a. It's been a disaster. I've shot it three times now and it's failed all three times. I still have to do it again. I watched. I can't remember their name. There are a few of the high tech people on YouTube, you know, 1020 million and they did this thing where one of them went out and shot with an iPhone and a Leica M11. [02:15:12] Speaker C: I watched and brought the pictures up. [02:15:14] Speaker A: And 90 of them could not tell which was which. [02:15:18] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:15:18] Speaker A: So on landscape that's fine. Yes, I could shooting people. It's a bit different but I'm trying to do it and I'm shooting everything from an iPhone to a little rx which a great camera. [02:15:31] Speaker C: Oh yeah. [02:15:32] Speaker A: One of the best cameras in the world. If you ever want for vlogging, for video, even for stills, there's a street photographer that only uses this. But anyway that through Malaika's or Hasselblads. And I'm talking about CC D, CCD sensor through to a CMOS sensor. So you can see the 2 difference from the Hasselblads. Right. Just. And we're just shooting a scene which isn't. It's a little bit challenging with light. And that's where I've messed up the one we did the other day. The light was too challenging and the iPhone won by a mile. [02:16:09] Speaker C: Yeah. Because of the computational like dynamic range and stuff like that. [02:16:13] Speaker A: I. I was running it through the moment app which you can turn off all the Apple stuff even then I had full detailing all the mountains in the background right into the shadows where the model was standing. Whereas every other camera blew out the background completely. Unusable. [02:16:30] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:16:31] Speaker B: Yeah. They're pretty remarkable. [02:16:32] Speaker A: Now, the only problem with the iPhone is it is horrible to take pictures with. [02:16:36] Speaker C: Yeah, terrible. Have you ever tried the Leica grip they make for them? [02:16:41] Speaker A: Yeah, but you have to use the Leica app, don't you? I think the button only works with the Leica app and. Sorry, that last presets, I think. [02:16:50] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:16:51] Speaker A: No, I'm. It's not. I am using the iPhone a lot more for video. We have. What's the name of the company? What's the gamble use back for the phones, the iPhones. Insta. Insta. 360 Flow. [02:17:07] Speaker C: Oh, yes. Yep. [02:17:08] Speaker A: They are the best because they've got. They can. Without running through their app. You can just use the camera and they'll track you. And they track. Perfect. You can walk out of the room and walk back in. It'll find you again every time. It's a tiny little one. It has a selfie stick. Really, really handy. We. I'm using a lot on shoots just to, you know, whenever we're recording, it's one of our cameras. A lot of the times when I'm working with a model, I'm now especially to get her up to speed, I'm throwing my iPhone on a little bracket I can put on top of my camera. And while I'm shooting, it's videoing. And after we do a little bit, I throw her and let her see the video. She goes, oh, I look really stiff, don't I? See, I can give them feedback. But this is looking so good. So we can. I can use that to build her up a bit. There's a video. We put up a You. An iPhone, sort of crop version on Instagram. There's a full version on my website of Beck in far North Queensland. Most of it was shot on iPhone 13. This is video on a beach in far North Queensland. You'll be surprised at the detail on her black hair. Right. So the iPhone is incredible for that stuff. The other gear we use, the Sony still has the A7. S3 is still like. They haven't the FX. Sorry. The FX3 is the equivalent, but I didn't go to that, so I already owned the other one. We use an FX6 in the studio. We don't really travel with that because it's too big and heavy. We've got the little Z. Is it ZV back? Zv, which is great. It's. We can use S log, cine log and do all these things with it. It's really small. The only thing is it overheats so quick. So I bought this little fan system to go on it, nice and cheap. $34. Yeah. Two weeks later, it doesn't work anymore. So we bought. We bought the sim. I don't know what they called sim rig, small rig, fan. [02:19:25] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. [02:19:25] Speaker C: Yep. [02:19:26] Speaker A: But it doesn't have a battery in it, so now you have to connect the battery to it. But you're on a gimbal now, so now you have to mount a battery somewhere on it. So I got this little biggish battery that I could clip onto it. 20 minutes of filming, the battery had gone flat, so I have to run a bigger battery pack on top of the camera just to run the fan. The small rig works perfect. It will hold the camera below 30 degrees, which is great. Without that, it'll just go up to 35 and shut down. So that's the only problem with that. That's pretty much our video gear that we travel with. It's got our sound gear, too. Because we're doing podcasts when we're traveling, when we're just filming stuff in the studio, I'm just using a small zoom system that just clips onto me. It's got 32 bit float. It works perfect. I can stick them and hide them on models even. They're really easy to completely hide. When we're doing our podcast, we just use the Sennheiser system, but we run that back through a Zoom 3, which is 32 bit float. And I. I can't. Sorry. It's really hard to not sound technical, but when you're doing your stuff, you just have to learn. You've got no choice. When we did the first couple of podcasts, everyone kept on saying how quiet was and looking. We're sort of clipping the meters out like crazy. And I'm a fully qualified sound engineer, but things have changed so much. There's another thing called bluffs. So I had to learn all these luff crap, and now I know what loudness means. And now I run loudness luff meters to make sure that we're running -16. So it's all this stuff that you have to learn. Yeah, it's this big circle, but once you learn it, then it starts falling into place. [02:21:19] Speaker B: Well, I think what's also great about. Sorry, Jay. [02:21:23] Speaker C: No, that's great. No, no, go on. [02:21:25] Speaker B: I was just going to say one of the. One of the great things that I love about your approach to your craft is how much you're prepared to share, you know, and even just that, that video that I watched this morning. I can't remember if it was like 10 or 15 or 20 minutes but if you and Beck going through your whole holiday your travel gear was. Was quite eye opening about just all the little bits and pieces that go into. You know it's all the bits in your toolkit. It's the little bag of clips. It's the, it's, it's the different batteries. It's. You know and you have all laid out. [02:21:56] Speaker A: You wouldn't believe how much that bag has saved me. Like the amount of studios I've been into. And the little nipple thing on the boom arm is fully round. The profoto friggin knob is so useless. You try and turn it and it just swings back to the bottom. So it swings back to the bottom. So I have to travel with the little spigots with flats on it so I can just tie it onto a flat. Now no studios have it. The amount of little bits and pieces I'm carrying and the amount of times I'm getting photographers out of trouble because they don't even have bits and pieces. They're having a problem with their kit and I have to go put this on and this will do this. So it we've learned and I wish I didn't have to carry the stuff. We are pretty much here. The four bags are normally sitting up around about 28, 29 kilo each. My backpack is normally 32 kilo as carry on my computer. My computer bag. Bear with me. [02:22:59] Speaker C: Wonder if he's ever been dinged. If they've ever tried to put it under. Once they try to put it under the plane. [02:23:06] Speaker A: This is my computer bag. All right. That normally comes in at 27 kilo. [02:23:13] Speaker C: What do you got gold bars in there? [02:23:15] Speaker A: No lead. I've normally got 40 terabyte of hard drives and that's not even 40 terabyte. [02:23:28] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:23:30] Speaker A: Because I have to have stuff for anybody in the world can contact me. Yes. It's your file. [02:23:36] Speaker C: Yeah. So you carry basically your archive of finished images with you. [02:23:40] Speaker A: I have. I have three 4 terabyte Samsung drives which is all of my retouch tiffs. [02:23:50] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:23:51] Speaker A: Yeah. And they're on me. The clouds are wasted. It just doesn't work. You get somewhere like Germany. You're lucky if you can get five on your Internet. The Internet's so ridiculous and uploading is just terrible. So all these things we learned but the we only got caught once where it was Paris. Don't fly Air France. Never ever ever fly Air France. Terrible. We missed our first flight, because of we're there two and a half hours before the flight. It took us forever to get through the customs because you have to. Your bags will have to. As you get in the queue to go to. They want to wear your bags. So we zigzagged and got through that. We finally got through to the metal detector thing. They only had one person working and every bag was getting flagged as having something problem with. And I only had one person working. So Beck managed to get to the plane. We were still being the metal detector queue with another 40 people waiting for their bags to be hand checked. So we missed our flight. We then had to go back out to the front of the airport to get new tickets to come back through that whole system again. [02:25:04] Speaker C: Oh, God. Yeah. [02:25:07] Speaker A: And we only had two and a half hours till our flight. At least the thing went. But. All right. So they did manage to stop us put our bag. They don't want to put just one. They want to put all your hand luggage on this together. And they're only allowing you 10 kilo. [02:25:22] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:25:23] Speaker A: So they said, nah, you gotta check this in. So went over. We tried to tell him, I can't check it in. It's full of batteries. [02:25:30] Speaker C: Oh, yeah. [02:25:31] Speaker A: So went over, went to counter and he put on the SC goes, no, this has to be checked in. And the bag. And he goes, this can't be checked in. Walked us back and said, let these people through. Yeah. I said, this bag here has got $140,000 of camera gear in it and it's full of batteries. He goes, we're not checking this in. No way are we checking this in. [02:25:54] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:25:55] Speaker B: Common sense prevails. [02:25:56] Speaker A: One thing. One thing with it is there's a couple of videos on YouTube. Look them up. One of them's the F1 guy. There's an Australian F1 photographer. He's got a really good thing about how to get heavy gear and that through customs. His little tricks. There's a couple about getting. Especially in America, places like that. A really hard just. Even on internal flights, we tend to fly Qantas. We fly a lot. So we have a high status. We're allowed to take more luggage. It might be a bit more fly premium or business. Even on. You'll find if you're using points, it's not that much more expensive that way. They tend to skip you. Yeah. [02:26:38] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:26:39] Speaker A: You don't have the overhead luggage problems. Try and get on the plane as early as possible. So your bag isn't one of the ones that one of the staff have to lift. [02:26:48] Speaker C: Yeah. Exact. And. And just act like they're light. You gotta wander around like it's light. [02:26:53] Speaker A: You would be surprised at one of my bags. I. I can. I just swing it like there's no weight in it. [02:26:59] Speaker C: It's 32 kilos. [02:27:01] Speaker A: They can't even lift it off the ground. [02:27:03] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:27:04] Speaker A: These are just the things everyone thinks it'd be a joy to be six months of the year traveling the world. Sorry. Airports, customs, Uber, Airbnb hotels. I'll give. Every one of them is just a pain in the butt. Yeah, yeah. Just on the gear thing, I just want to quickly think. I've done a few videos about gear and it's so hard for me to do them. But just listen to me carefully. If you've got a car, you buy a new car. You can't drive it, can you? Feels odd. Definitely can't drive it like you drove your last car. So every bit of new gear you buy, you've just put yourself back a month to three months. So I can tell you some of the greatest photographers that are working commercially in the world today that are using gear that is more than 15 years old. I'm one of them. My 80 mil lens is 24 years old. My Hasselblad is 14 years old. My other one's about 17 years old. My Leica's SL2 SL2s. Right. They're not the latest one. And I'm not. I didn't even get the latest one. It is about the gear and it's not about the gear. And what that means is. And this is part of the video I'm trying to do, if you grab. If I grab all my gear and I started to take pictures with every single one. My Sony, A1, my Leicas, my Hasselblads, the iPhone. And which one felt good to shoot with, right? This thing feels horrible to shoot with. There's my viewfinder. Right? It's horrible to shoot with. So I don't care how good the pictures are, trying to shoot with is just uncomfortable. The iPhone is horrible to shoot with. The Leicas are a joy to shoot with because in the viewfinder has all the information I want. [02:29:03] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:29:04] Speaker A: My viewfinder is black and white. I have highlight alert, which I can tell what. Where to turn on. I can say I want my highlight alerts turned on at 242. Bang. It's there. I have my focus peaking and a really simple menu system. My Hasselblad is my favorite of all to actually shoot, except I have no detail in the viewfinder finder. I don't have focus picking. I have highlights, I don't have histograms. I don't have anything. This is one of the reasons why I'm not an Ambassador Hasselblad, because they brought out their mirrorless one. We've lost the beautiful viewfinder to a TV screen that has no information. Can't go black and white, no histogram, no highlight alerts. What's the use of having a mirrorless? Yep. Same as Nikon and Canon. So people gonna. Nikon, Canon, Nikon, Canon, people. I've said this many times. You need to start sending emails to these companies. Otherwise they'll keep doing this. How come a videographer with this camera can get Zebring to show you when he is clipping and you put it onto photo mode. Oh, you don't get it. [02:30:16] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:30:16] Speaker A: Why. Why do videographers get it? And why don't the Nick and Cannon Hasselblad. They won't change it. They don't want you shooting in manual. They want you on the AI modeling coming soon. You have to pay a monthly subscription for. And it'll work like an iPhone. It is going to take measurements everywhere. There's your soul. Yeah, it's already there. I already seen Sony. Really? Yes. One click is going to take three photos minimum in RAW. [02:30:50] Speaker C: Computational, computational RAWs. [02:30:53] Speaker A: Yep, it's already there. [02:30:56] Speaker C: I don't like that. [02:30:58] Speaker A: Right. But this is why they. They don't want you having a soul. And for me, it doesn't worry me because guess what? My work's going to start really standing out. [02:31:09] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. Yep. [02:31:11] Speaker A: Because it's not going to look like everybody. Even if you look at what's happened with digital cameras, it's allowed people with a lot less experience get into photography and be commercial. This is going to be the next level. You're not going to need to know anything. [02:31:27] Speaker C: Every iteration on tech, like going from film, sorry, camera tech, going from film, you know, through to digital. And then obviously mirrorless was. Was a huge step where it's like, hey, if it looks good in the viewfinder, it's good. [02:31:39] Speaker A: You're good. Yeah. [02:31:41] Speaker C: And then if it gets to the point where it's. It's essentially AI in the image at the time of capture to make it be, I don't know, whatever it thinks the image should be a perfect landscape. Everything exposed accurately the way. The way it thinks it should be. Good horizon leveling without having, you know, your cameras like this. But it just straightens it. This will be Crazy. [02:32:08] Speaker B: Remember that camera they brought out a few years back and it had, I think it had like nine or eight lenses on it. [02:32:14] Speaker A: Yes. [02:32:14] Speaker B: And so it just photographed everything at every depth, at every ISO. And you could just later go in and choose. [02:32:21] Speaker C: Yeah, I think, yeah, you know, you. [02:32:23] Speaker B: Go in and choose which bits of the image. But there was no creativity to it. It just. It basically just recorded a bunch of data and you just selected which data points you wanted to make an image with. [02:32:35] Speaker C: Tennis. Two people have brought up quote of the day. They don't to want. Want you to have a soul. That is, that is. I think maybe I'll retitle this image the thumbnail that camera brands don't want you to have a soul. [02:32:49] Speaker A: I got so annoyed. I was in a meeting with Hasselblad in Europe and this was just before the XD1 Mark 2 was to come out. And I'm sitting with the top guys in a very private. Nothing being released. And I had to sign all this stuff. And I said to him, so what photographers you've been dealing with? So I said, oh, none. So how did you decide? Oh, our marketing team. No, I'm serious. Again, there's that committee marketing team. They're not. So how. Think about carefully look at all the cameras out. How much do you think they're actually asking photographers? I couldn't believe it. The yesterday was like DGI brought. DJI brought out their new gimbal. [02:33:37] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:33:37] Speaker A: From the very first gimbal they ever brought out. I said, why don't they just have a freaking screw that you can just turn rather than have to move a clip and slide this sticky thing to get it balanced. Why can't we just screw turn to odd commercial. It costs too much. Guess what they released yesterday, everyone. The access is the screw on it. That should have been done five years ago. If you'd given it to. If you'd asked me, same with Leica, the latest camera, the SL Mark SL3. If they'd asked me, I would have said, well, I don't want two different cards in my camera. I don't want two slots, but not two different cards. That's a pain in the ass. Yeah, my computer has this card reader now I'm gonna have to carry another card reader in my friggin. Oh, I've got to plug it. So I went through all the things that they put on their camera. See, I don't care about autofocus. I'm only in manual. And all these things is. I don't like a new Camera, there's nothing on it that would make me want to buy. And that's where I am with gear that I would say 80% of my photos taken on the H6D50 with an 80 mil lens already telling you what I should be shooting now for ISO and for on the run and that that's where my Leica's come in. And I do love the Leica glass, but again, I've come down to my favorite lenses and I've managed to sell five or six lenses. I've got another four or five I'm selling because I'm just not their way. Having them is confusing my photography. If you've only got one lens, you don't think about it. You have two lenses now you're thinking you have five lenses. You're not taking a picture. [02:35:25] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, that's. It's interesting because we actually had this discussion with Glenn Lavender the other night on the podcast where he's got the opposite view where although he's generally working in a less controlled situations, I guess, but he, he, he wants to have every option so that he's not constrained in the. Whatever he wants to do in that moment by gear. He's like, I don't want to be limited, going, if only I had a wide or if only I had a. You know, so he's, he's the opposite. Whereas I struggle with that. I like to have. I've. I've made my best work when I've had less lenses available, but I haven't always been able to do that because you shoot a wedding. But I remember one wedding, Jim and I were working together, and I said to Jim at the start of the day, I'm like, I mean, only using the 50 today. You're gonna have to get everything else that they might want. And so he did the hard work and I got to just rock around with the 50 mil and I got. I took better photos. [02:36:15] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:36:16] Speaker C: Than I normally take. Yeah. [02:36:19] Speaker A: Yeah. When I'm traveling, I've. I Normally take a 50 mil and an 80 mil with my Hasselblad, because if I'm shooting in Airbnbs and I want to shoot just slightly lower and on my backs against the wall, there's nothing I can do. Yeah. But I'm shooting mainly prime, so I'm not even shooting with zooms. [02:36:35] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:36:36] Speaker A: But again. Yeah. What? I have a wide in malaika bag that I carry. 16, 18, 21. It's like a click, click, click wide. Oh, it's a beautiful. It's got so many Distortions. It's so crap. It takes the most amazing photos. I love it. It's an F4. It's literally 16, click 18, click 21. [02:36:56] Speaker C: I wish, and I wish camera manufacturers more of them made those, you know, like instead of a zoom. [02:37:01] Speaker A: And the whole camera is only that big. It's a tiny. And I took a picture of my old assistant at the Eiffel Tower and the pitch is just to die for. And I carry that just in case I'm going to do that type of shot. But in my normal work, I'm not wider than 50. [02:37:22] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:37:23] Speaker A: If I'm doing a fashion shoot. Yeah. A fashion street show might come with 35. I even go down to a 16. I've shot 16 mil for fashion. But most 90% of my work is sitting around that 50 to 80 area. So why am I carrying all these other lenses if that's 90% of my work? [02:37:43] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. [02:37:45] Speaker C: Is it. Is it mostly for your sl? Is it mostly M glass with an adapter or are you using some of the native SL lenses as well now? [02:37:53] Speaker A: Same glasses with adapter. I've got one SL. I've got the 90, 24 90. I don't. It's too big, too heavy. Don't. And I'm used to big and heavy. I just don't like it. I just. It's going to go up for sale. [02:38:09] Speaker C: Yeah, Yeah. [02:38:10] Speaker A: I actually got a question. Oh, yeah, sorry. [02:38:12] Speaker B: No, no, you're right. Please finish. [02:38:14] Speaker A: I was just going to say I only bought it because I. My hassle blades are limited. In fact, the one I'm shooting at the moment, I've already seen the signs. It's going to die. Which means that's 10,000 in the rubbish bin. I have three 50 megapixel H6s. I own them right now. I have one 100 megapixel H6 and I've got two dead backs on top of that. I. Whenever I see one for sale, if it's got a low count, I've been buying it because you cannot get them repaired and you don't know when they're going to go. The last trip to Europe, mine went on the third day, so I had to do the rest of the trip without it. [02:38:58] Speaker C: Oh, gosh. [02:39:00] Speaker A: So now I'm going to be carrying two backs anyway. [02:39:05] Speaker C: Yeah. Just to add to it. Oh, God. [02:39:08] Speaker B: Justin, I want you to ask your usual question, the zombie one, but I just want to preface it with, you know, watching that video this morning and talking to you here today. You know, There's a. There's a lot of bits and pieces that go into your kit to do the work that you do. But there's a question that we ask every guest about one particular camera. Justin, do you want to fire that one away? [02:39:32] Speaker C: If it was the end of the world zombie apocalypse and you grab your flamethrower so you can cook them and then in the other hand, you can only grab one camera and lens, lens combo to document the end of the world however you want to, whether it's in the studio with a well behaved zombie or whatever. [02:39:52] Speaker A: What. [02:39:52] Speaker C: What's what? One camera and lens would be your. [02:39:54] Speaker A: Go to SL2s with the 50 mil that I've got. Can't tell you the numbers behind it, but it's my favorite. It's taken me 850 mils on the Leica to find it. It's one that doesn't have a tab on it. It's just a, it's a Sumilux, but I can't remember all the numbers. Give me the shit. So it's. [02:40:16] Speaker C: I don't understand like. [02:40:17] Speaker A: And the reason would be the SL2S IS. Yes, the S has better low light before it's gone. If I need the video as well, I think I'd just take the SL too because it has a much better video. And I'll just go slower shutter speeds for nighttime. [02:40:37] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:40:38] Speaker B: And a follow up question for you, Peter. When you're not packing all of this gear for, you know, whether it be a Europe trip or a workshop that you're running or whatever it may be, do you just head out the door with a camera in hand to shoot whatever comes to you? Or is your photography very much an application that, you know, is, is well thought out and well, well planned and it's more structured. [02:41:02] Speaker A: Well, you'll see on a few of the videos we've done outside, like on beaches and things like that, it's pretty much you'll be Muzzo 2 cameras. So it'll be a Hasselblad and there'll be a medium format and a 35 mil. And it's also to get different looks. So Hasselblad has a look. I just love its look. It's. It's sitting around 5.6 to F8. I just really love that look. But then if I wanted to have something a little bit more moody, a bit more fall off, you know, that's where I've got a beautiful antique 75 sum Lux on my Leica. It flares like a. It flares so Easy. It's soft, but silver. Razor sharp. It's soft. It's a 1984 lens. It's an old lens. Friggin love it. It just. It feels like film and actually and it. I just adore using it. So I. I take better pictures because I really like using it. This more modern 75 summicron technically is a better lens. It's got a bit more contrast. The focus peaking shows up better. I don't enjoy shooting with it. [02:42:09] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:42:09] Speaker A: And if you enjoy shooting with it, you take better shots. [02:42:12] Speaker C: Yes. [02:42:13] Speaker B: You're more engaged. [02:42:14] Speaker A: More engaged. You're not. If you enjoy it, you don't think about your gear. You're only thinking about what you're capturing. As soon as you start thinking about gear while you're shooting, you've just destroyed your creativity. You gear needs. That's with a Hasselblad. It just disappears in my hand. Yeah. I'm so used to the weight, so used to everything. And I know it sounds. I know exactly all that sound. It's about to crash. I know exactly all my sounds. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, it's pretty much Hasselblad with my 80 on there. And just take a. Like with something a bit more motives, you know, maybe slightly longer or you know something will go down to F2 or F4. 1. F1. 2. F 1.4 if I wanted to use that. [02:43:01] Speaker C: Yeah. I saw this before. Mia Muse has been in the comment tapes. Thank you Mia Muse for getting amongst it and said that ask about earlier in the show. Said ask about the shirt. And then the shirt is the best key piece of gear. Show us the shirt. What's going on with the shirt? [02:43:15] Speaker A: That's Beck in Paris leaning out the balcony overlooking. We. We did a thing for a little bit that there's certain things that we do. So Beck has a thing with a sheet in Paris. So quite often I think we've done three or four shoots in Paris where she's just wearing a sheet. So it's funny how we can get some just silly nothing and make a series out of it. So yeah, the. The thing on the shirts. Yeah. Some people think it's creepy and I get creeped out because I think it's creepy. I just think they're creepy. But I don't have. There's nothing on the shirt that says I took this photo. So when I'm wearing this on a shirt, it's just a T shirt with a picture on it. Yep. I really like this picture. In fact, I love this picture. I love it. More than most other T shirt pictures. Does that make sense? [02:44:06] Speaker C: Yep. Yeah. [02:44:06] Speaker A: So I'd rather wear something that I love. I appreciate it. So I'm not using to show off because nobody knows I took it. [02:44:15] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [02:44:16] Speaker A: So I pretty much every day decide who I'm wearing. I'd have 30, 40 T shirts hanging up. There's not that many pictures, but that's having got hanging up. And yeah, I get up in the morning and think I've had enough of becklets. Who else have I got? Then the next thing is, how many times have you been commented about your T shirt? Think about it. How often? [02:44:45] Speaker C: Not often. [02:44:46] Speaker B: Right. [02:44:47] Speaker C: In black. [02:44:48] Speaker A: Beck knows when we're traveling all the time. Very rare I go through customs without someone saying, oh, cool T shirt or who's that on his shirt? [02:44:58] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:44:59] Speaker A: Right. So it's created. That's already telling me that my other people, without even knowing I took the photo are telling me that my work's cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [02:45:10] Speaker C: Without even. Yeah, no, no, they're not. They don't know who you are or anything like that. Yeah, yeah. Do you follow it up and sort of, I guess continue the conversation that, you know, depends on the photo or. [02:45:23] Speaker A: Yeah, it depends. It really depends on who says it and the way they said it sometimes. Yeah. Thanks. Cool. [02:45:29] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [02:45:30] Speaker A: So but then one of. I got one T shirt that I saw get through American customs because it's four pictures of Natasha on the shirt. And customs always spend more time looking at the pictures going, oh wow. Yeah, you can go. [02:45:45] Speaker C: And worrying about you. That's awesome. [02:45:47] Speaker A: It is. They tend to. We know the American customs is one I tend to put on. Although I was wearing it once when we were flying to London, but we had to go through Singapore to Dubai. And some of the flight crew didn't said, when I get off at Dubai, I can't wear that T shirt. So I had to put another shirt over the top that didn't have boots or anything on it. They just didn't like. [02:46:11] Speaker C: Yeah, too suggestive. Conservative. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now I know we're, we're. Yeah, we're rolling on. I'm sure you've got plenty of stuff to do, but I, I will get in trouble off Tony if I don't ask you about your sim rig. When did you get into. Into. So for anyone that doesn't know what a sim rig is, it's basically like a virtual racing car that you can have in your house or wherever, but it feels very similar to a real car. It's kind of like it's, it's about as close as you could get without actually getting very immersive driving around a track, very immersive. Screens wrap around and it's got, you know, it's not like a toy steering wheel, it's like real steering wheels. The pedals feel real, they've got the steering wheels. Got feedback. Anyway. Yeah. When did you get into that? [02:46:57] Speaker A: About 10. No, be more than that. Maybe 12 years ago. I needed an out. I was spending all my time just photography. No hobby, no nothing else in photography. I loved it, but I needed an escape. I needed something I could just go out and punch something, you know what I mean? Just something completely different. And I used to race carts when I was young and I love it. And when I bought one of my cars, I got some track day. Friggin loved it. And then BMW found out I was a photographer. Then I could go down anytime I like on track days and then they start letting me free on the track without an instructor near me. I could just grab an M4 Phillip island, go as hard as I like because I could see I could drive. Then I found out this sim stuff went and tried one and. Yeah, and it's not a game. As much as you think it's a game. It's not a game. It's not running properly at the moment. I got busy and I didn't use it for six months. And when I came back, everything needed to be updated, upgraded and things didn't work with my old hardware. But my system is built on a proper racing car. I predominantly love racing, GT3 and GTE. So that's all of that style of car. My brake is set to 140 kilo, so for my brake to lock, my pedal is 140 kilo of pressure to get it to the lock my steering wheel. If I hit a wall and don't take my hands off it, it'll break a thumb, it'll break a wrist. It's proper feedback. Exactly. You feel the understeer, you feel everything. I have four of these shaker woofer things. One under each, my feet left and right on the pedal box and one left and right under my seat. So you hit ripple strips. You feel it on your front tire or your back tire? [02:48:55] Speaker C: Oh, that's nuts. Tony didn't have that. [02:48:59] Speaker A: It's got the, the full motion rig. I've got the seat belt tightness. So as you hit the brakes, the seat belts pull you back just like. [02:49:07] Speaker C: Like it would feel in the car. [02:49:10] Speaker A: So it's got all of that stuff, wind machines which the faster you go, the more wind comes through from the front. [02:49:15] Speaker C: Whoa. What you've got wind machines? [02:49:17] Speaker A: Yeah, there's two, two wind outlets there and there and they're controlled by. The faster you go, the more wind comes out. [02:49:24] Speaker C: Tony doesn't have that. [02:49:28] Speaker B: I'm a gamer, I've been a gamer my whole life. But the sim racing stuff is just next level. [02:49:33] Speaker A: But then it's not, it's not a game. What people don't realize in real life you have less rules. It's not as strict in real life. So on the sim track in a race and you're. I'm racing humans, I'm not racing AI. It's all people that I can talk to over my microphone, just hit and chat to the whole group or I can set up channels while we're racing. So we have to qualify first. You can come into a practice, you come in, then qualify in your qualifying. If you put one tire off the track anywhere, time's deleted. [02:50:13] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:50:13] Speaker A: So it's not like F1. You can take a bit struggle Jim1. Once you're in the race, one tire just going off the track is going to hit you with a point penalty. [02:50:26] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:50:26] Speaker A: If you hit someone up the ass that's four points. If you spin out it could be two or four points. You've only got 16 points for a 40 minute race. Once you hit your 16 points you've got to go to the pits and do a timeout. Might be 10 minute or 5 minute or 2 minute. But where when we're racing we're just like real car racing. We are fighting for 10th of seconds. [02:50:55] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:50:55] Speaker A: So we've got our own cheats. Even when we come into the pit we have our cheats to get the fastest in and out lap without being booked for speeding. It's a little trick you do by tapping the accelerator pedal and bake pedal as you're driving through. By doing that you can gain a quarter of a second over somebody who's not doing it in the pits. That quarter of a second is hard to make up on the track. Yeah, I know it sounds crazy but once you and I, I have a coach team which I use that's got me racing even better. Your car feels like a real car. They've now got full weather on the system I use. So you've got rain, you got all that stuff on there. You have your pit stops, you crash, it damages your car too. All of a sudden your car's got an understeer on it. It won't drive properly. [02:51:41] Speaker C: So Jim, Jim did a rally stage on the weekend. So we went to Tony's. We'd done some laps around Bathurst and then Tony was like, all right, we'll try the rally car. Jim in, in a 10 minute rally stage he got to the point where the, the system was like, your car no longer runs. D he crashed it so many times they were like, nah, it doesn't even. At first it started not steering very well. Then by the end of it it just stopped like, you suck. Tony wants to know what your go to program is on. On the sim. [02:52:14] Speaker A: On the sim. I'm iracing. [02:52:17] Speaker C: Iracing? [02:52:18] Speaker A: Yeah, Iracing. That's the only one I use. I've, I've tried all the others. But iracing for me is. It's the one that feels the most natural to a real car. I know that. I've been on Phillip Island a lot. I know that track very well. On iracing, it's nearly identical. The bump is exactly where it is. When I hit that bump, lift off the brake, my whole car will rotate. I can get on the accelerator exactly as I do on the track. So I like that. The other thing is on, on it there's, you tend to, there's people like Shane van Gisborne, Scott McLaughlin, all of these guys you tend to. Every now and then you get in the same spot splitters, one of these great drivers. I've actually been in a race where Max Versappen's been on board. I've been in one where Orlando, Orlando Norris has been in. [02:53:06] Speaker C: That's nuts. [02:53:08] Speaker A: They're on all the time. Max, Max has won the 24 hour. They run 24 hour races too. 24 hour Daytona, 24 hour Spa Nurburgring and they literally 24 hours, you have three drives in different countries. You pull in the pitch, you get out of the car, he gets in another country. [02:53:23] Speaker C: Oh, that's awesome. [02:53:24] Speaker A: That's. That's so cool. [02:53:25] Speaker C: Yeah, it sounds so fun. [02:53:27] Speaker A: It is fun. You get on, you learn a track, you practice a bit, you get into race, there's a whole grading. If you don't have many accidents and you finish high, your numbers go up, you get into better splits in the race. The quicker you can get away from the rookies, the less damage you get. The rookies just tend to punch you. It is and it's not. It's. I don't never felt it was ever like a game. It feels like real life life to me because it is so structured and you can't just Ram someone. You can get banned for life. Someone did get banned recently for life and it's. You go on there. You do maybe 40 minute. If on new track. 40 minute practice qualify a race for that might be 40 minutes. Says two hours. Go have a shower because you're literally covered in sweat by the end of it. So it's hard work. [02:54:16] Speaker C: Yeah. We're sweating after 10 minutes. [02:54:20] Speaker A: To me. To me it's not a waste of time because I've thoroughly enjoyed it. [02:54:24] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:54:25] Speaker A: And it's been a complete escape. I don't have to think about clients or feeding back or. [02:54:36] Speaker C: I do. I do love that you've. You've wallpapered it with images inspire you your own photos and things. So you're kind of. You're decompressing but you're also compressing kind of feeding your. I don't know, the, the. The passive kind of artistic brain or whatever. Like you're not. You're not looking at them intently. They're just there. Yeah. [02:54:58] Speaker A: It's also. It's a feelgood room. I walk into that room and I just feel good. The sim's there, the pictures are there. [02:55:07] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:55:07] Speaker A: So it's just been in that room. It's sort of like this reset I think everybody needs at the moment. I still don't have that to reset on. Music's also a reset for me too. If I get on and I love writing and I was saying before this one did recently, Beck. It's on my webpage. It'll mostly go on YouTube this week or next week. But just writing music and then putting the music onto your timeline and then editing footage of a model to match in with the music and creators. That's just so much fun. Really enjoy doing that. But that's both of my passions. That music is a passion. And we managed to get Tomorrowland tickets this year. So I'm really happy. We didn't think we were going to get them. [02:55:54] Speaker C: Sorry to buy. I heard you had to buy scalped ones. [02:55:57] Speaker B: Yes. [02:55:57] Speaker A: It's the only way. Literally. So we. We not only do Global Journey, that just was sold out. So then we booked. We had pre sale 1 1/2 minutes. Sold out. 200000 people a day. Gone. [02:56:13] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:56:13] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:56:14] Speaker A: It is like the problem is there's too many people are telling everyone how good it is and it is. It is good. And I didn't feel old there. Sounds stupid. I did not feel old there. [02:56:26] Speaker C: It felt like I would feel out there. [02:56:28] Speaker A: No really. I'd say the average age would be 30, 35. Okay. [02:56:34] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:56:34] Speaker C: And it's just like 21. [02:56:36] Speaker A: No. And Beck calls it adults Disneyland. Well, these. And so there's just places you can go if it gets a little bit much for you. There's these chill areas. They've got some nice music playing. It's still outside. And there's a couple of bars there. You taste your wine first. So they'll say, which one would you like? Oh, yeah, that one. I'll do the glass. They have freshly shucked oysters. They have crayfish, have steak barbecue. Not joking. [02:57:07] Speaker C: Yeah. It would just be like. [02:57:11] Speaker A: 16 stages of music simultaneously running. And you can just bounce around the stages. We get a bit tired. You go into one them, chill out, have a couple of drinks, then go back in. The crowd are amazing. Yeah, we did. I had oysters every day. And the crowder, the food. All right. The best thing is in the last two years ago we went. We did both weekends, so it's six days. We did. I was averaging 30,000 or 35,000 steps a day for those six days. There was only one toilet. I didn't go into. [02:57:52] Speaker C: It. Was it part of the. We're hoping to clean the toilets or. [02:57:55] Speaker A: They cleaned the toilets. Like, ah, they're spotless. There's only one toilet. I've owned the donga nut. Every other toilet, just clean. As you go to an area which is a refresh area. You lift up your arms, they spray you with deodorant. There's a sunscreen areas. No, it's. It's. It's really, really hard to explain. And the crowd is just unbelievable. Every. You don't see Splendor in the Grass. [02:58:21] Speaker C: Yeah, there was only one toilet that I did go into. Every. Every other one was covered in everything. It was. Yeah, it was the opposite. It was horrible. Especially because we camped. So like by the end of the weekend it was. It was intense. [02:58:37] Speaker A: Anyway, we're happy that we've got our. It'll most about the last time I go, but it is a thing and I love music so much and I was so happy last time I went. I got to see Swedish House Mafia live, which I have never seen them before. To see them on the big stage was incredible. And then DJs Dead Mouse and res and people like that that I really, really enjoy. And to see them on these massive stages with incredible light shows, it's just to die for. And it's like, you know, that was one hour. Let's what's happening next hour. And you just go from. And every stage Is different. And yeah, it's for a musician, it's just to die. [02:59:20] Speaker C: Do you come back from that with any sort of renewed creativity or change the perspective for your photographic work? [02:59:30] Speaker A: Not creativity, I just go more free. Mind is more like being cleansed, opened. I can think freer. So I don't go there and think of ideas. It's more like a complete drainage. As much as I can do whatever I like, it's my business. Business is still. Bills have to be paid every single month. There's still things, you know, things are out of your control that can really upset you, but it's had nothing to do with you. You know, some, you know, some shitty band like Motley Crue steal your photos for two years and you can't even sue them because of America's copyright laws. And just like that, that when people steal your stuff and you can't do anything about it. Richard Prince sold one of my pictures. He's took off Instagram for $90,000. Oh. Can't do a thing about it. So things like that, there's lots of those things that suck when one of my hassle bloods die, that sucks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But no, besides that, life is good and I've got a lot, a lot more control over my life than most people. But if you put in the hard yards and work really, really hard and I never worked for the money. Money was never my driving goal. If money was my driving goal, I don't think I'd be where I am today. Money just happens. It comes as soon as you start chasing it. You'll lose the best jobs. And those best jobs will then end up making you the most money. I did a little dance shoot as a 1 1/2 hour shoot with a 16 year old dancer. 1/2 hours, no editing, just simple octave box. He just wore jeans. And that was it. And the Italian dance company bought those images off me. Full year's usage rights. Like it was the best paying job I've ever had. And it was a one hour shoot. [03:01:29] Speaker C: Yep. And, and I guess that's the thing is the end, the, the end user, they don't care if it took an hour or a day or no, they, they want the images they want. [03:01:37] Speaker A: They, they. Yeah, the, the images. I sent them to a couple of dance magazines that went viral through them and then the Italian dance company said that suits our program for this year and they bought usage for them for a year. And it's a lot of money. [03:01:50] Speaker C: Yeah, it's so good. It's the stories that we don't hear much anymore because of that. That part of the industry does seem harder and harder to. [03:01:59] Speaker A: It is harder and harder, especially with AI and that people can recreate stuff similarly and that. But I still. AI doesn't scare me for me. It scares me for other people. [03:02:10] Speaker C: Yeah. [03:02:10] Speaker A: Once you get. Once you get your own soul and show the world your soul. AI can't copy a solar. It can't. Can't do it with music, can't do it with pictures or anything. Mine is broken. AI could never come up with a model that fix that goes with my brain. So I'm completely safe with it. I'm more, more worried about with the AI is the amount of good people are going to lose because of AI to benefit a very small group of people who are already trillionaires. Yep. It's all going to be owned by four or five companies. They're just going to get richer. Everyone else is going to be less. [03:02:52] Speaker C: Just another step in that direction with what's happened with the, you know, the tech giants. [03:02:59] Speaker A: Yeah, it's exactly. [03:03:00] Speaker C: Facebook, Amazon, everything. And this is just the next step in that same direction. [03:03:05] Speaker B: It's like I said the other day. Sorry. A comment I made the other day was that, you know, social media platforms like Instagram used to work for. For us as photographers, but now it feels like we're working for them. [03:03:18] Speaker A: What, what annoys me with all of these platforms is when you first get on them, they beg and beg and beg for you to put on as much content as possible and build your following. And as soon as you built your following, oh, now you need to pay money for the following that you've built so they can see your picture. [03:03:35] Speaker C: Yep. Yep. To access your audience. [03:03:38] Speaker A: I'm not happy with what Apple's doing with their now subscription thing, although I love two of their programs and they've been doing that. I've had those programs forever. I've only ever paid from once. Yeah, I don't mind paying a bit more if I'm going to get regular updates like some of the other programs do. So that doesn't bother me. What bothers me is I got an email this morning saying subscription renewal for some AI chat thing which is on mail. I never signed up for this. Went on to it. No, I never signed up for it. It's starting, but it's been there for free. But as of March, you have to pay 59 a year for it. What? So I just went. It's an Apple thing. Came from Apple this morning. Yeah, I've still got the email sitting there to show back like amazing. It literally is Apple. What was the actual. What they call it or do you delete it back? [03:04:34] Speaker C: You wouldn't use mail anyway, would you, Justin? I don't know. I use the Gmail app but. But I'm sure they're figuring out ways to extract some more money using AI. Like AI stuff. [03:04:48] Speaker A: I can't. If I just bring up it was. I noticed it the other day in something on the Apple. I went to message something and I could have clicked this box which was going to change my response. I can't see it here. Anyway I. Yeah, I did get one this morning. I think it's not sitting in my off. Let's see if I can do tech with dyslexia. A little PL subscription renewal. Here we go. G. A 14 AI chat assistant. That's what it's called. It's come from Apple subscription renewal. I never set up a subscription. The subscription only starts in March. So it was never a subscription. [03:05:42] Speaker C: Interesting. [03:05:43] Speaker A: But that's how I make you think you've already agreed to it. Yeah. And it's like they're just telling you what day they're going to bill you. Yeah. Yeah. So I've gone in there to when you review and just said cancel. [03:05:55] Speaker C: Yeah. [03:05:56] Speaker A: Because I've never used it. I never would have used it. Expect us to. Typing. I don't type. Horrible job. I type like I take photos. One finger. [03:06:07] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah, well I used to. [03:06:12] Speaker B: I. I'm very conscious of time. [03:06:14] Speaker C: Yeah. [03:06:14] Speaker B: So we, we might, we might, we might draw a bow in this episode. But very easily sit here and chat for hours and hours and hours more. Definitely, Peter. But look, I think, I think it is a good place to park. Was there any last questions that Jim or Justin that you, either of you guys had? [03:06:33] Speaker C: You got anything on your mind, Jim? Oh, about a thousand things. So I think we'll have to leave that for another time. No, we got to get down for one of those five day workshops. That's what we. Yeah, we make that happen. [03:06:45] Speaker B: But look Peter, on behalf of us here at the Camera Life podcast, thank you so much for your time, your insight and your generosity of, of, of spirit and information and, and you know, I think also just cutting through this chase and calling out, especially with AI advancing, calling it out for what it is, that it's. It is soulless. That's why we, we take photos because we want to capture those moments, those soul like moments forever. And that can't be replicated by a machine. At least we hope it never can. But look, thank you so much once again. Absolute privilege to sit down and talk to you. We've been looking forward to this chat for quite some time. And also thanks to Beck for setting it all up in the background. She's done an amazing job. Justin, you got anything else you want to finish up with? [03:07:33] Speaker C: No, just other than that. Like, like we've said, you know, Peter runs workshops. Go to the Inspire website if you want to see more of the behind the scenes of the shoots. But there is plenty of. You can see a bit of that on YouTube for free. You'll get a feel for what the content's like. But I've been loving jumping on Inspire. This isn't an ad either. Peter didn't pay me to say this. I've just. I enjoyed digging around on there. There's. There's tons of videos and info and otherwise. The Peter and Beck podcast is a Fun Listen with184.4 episodes from all over the place. It seems like you guys do it just wherever you happen to be that week, which is pretty fun. [03:08:08] Speaker A: Yeah, we haven't missed an episode in 184. Every week it's gone up, rain, hell, shine and we. And it's not like some weeks we get there, we don't talk about what we're going to talk about. No idea. I might have a list. You might have a list. Or we might not. And we just talk crap. Sometimes it just us crapping on about nothing. Other times there might be a strong subject. But Beck and I, it's only like a one hour chat for Beck and I once a week. So debrief. Bit of a debrief. So yeah, it doesn't make us money. It was never meant to make us money. I think we most likely earned over those episodes maybe $200 in revenue. But that's not why we do it. It was never done for that. It was when we get. Especially when we go overseas, the guys turn up to the workshops and go, this is weird. It's like we all know you two and you know nothing about us but we know everything about YouTube. So it's sort of really good icebreaker for when we're on workshops overseas. [03:09:06] Speaker C: Yep. Yep. So that's very jump into that. And I don't know, is there anything else people should. Should know where to follow you, what to do? [03:09:15] Speaker A: No, just if. Yeah if you just go to. Even the web on my web page has a link to all everywhere to go. So just on that takes the workshops or Inspire and yeah we will always do our smaller bits on YouTube and quite often it's different. What we like the latest on. On flipping images that only went to YouTube because it's just a little quickie. I'd rather do something was a lot more in depth that goes on to inspire something that has a little bit more. Let's slow down a bit. Yeah. It might be a bit longer but you actually see the little bit of polishings and they're the important things. So when I'm setting up a light, you have to watch what I slowly polish that light up to is on YouTube. It's just. Oh, it's there. [03:10:00] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Because there's probably 20 steps in between. [03:10:03] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [03:10:05] Speaker B: Cool. [03:10:06] Speaker C: Very cool. Thank you, Peter. [03:10:08] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you so much. We'll. We'll say goodbye to some people in the chat as well. [03:10:12] Speaker C: We will. I should do. I should do our ad read. Greg, you didn't do an ad. Ready. Hey, if you want a leather camera strap, we make them lucky camera straps. So just go to Luckystraps.com if you do want to strap your camera. They're quick release anti theft cut resistant Dyneema webbing. All leather, very comfortable. Put them on any camera. We've got a lot of people using Leica SL2s and 3s with them and we even got a photo of someone using a Hasselblad X2D2 thingy R2D2 Star wars camera. So yeah, if you need something, you know where to go. There's our ad and with that we'll roll the music and read some chat comments out. Ian Thompson says thank you Peter. Wonderful episode. Well done guys. Phil Thompson's thank you so much for all of that incredible listening to Peter. His passion, knowledge and generosity in sharing the way he did. Yeah. 3 hours and 10 minutes. Insane. LTK photo. It was great. Thanks again Dennis. School of light says incredible. Peter, thanks so much mate. Julie Powell. [03:11:19] Speaker A: Thanks. [03:11:20] Speaker C: Dennis says AI can't copy your soul. Duh. Tintype man. Thank you east coast photography. Good to see you. Says thanks guys, especially Peter for sharing your knowledge. Gotta head off to the next shoot. [03:11:33] Speaker B: Awesome. [03:11:33] Speaker C: Have fun on your shoot. Tony, thanks for letting us use your sim. We're going to race Peter one day and get beaten by a lot. LTK photo 24 hour race would definitely recommend. I don't know. Thanks everyone that's been in the comments. Paul Sutton, good to see you. Leaf Busby, Philip Johnson me amuse everyone was here and with that. Thanks again Peter. [03:11:55] Speaker A: No worries. [03:11:56] Speaker C: Have a good day. [03:11:56] Speaker B: Don't forget to like and subscribe, everybody. [03:11:58] Speaker C: Oh, yeah.